


The Best French Detective (In New York)

by trimalchio



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-07 13:02:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 46,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trimalchio/pseuds/trimalchio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karim Benzema is a down-on-his-luck detective who gets a case he can't pass up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You're a Superstar

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Never happened, never will.
> 
> A/N Part 2: I got writer's block, so I changed the location to New York. Consider this a tribute to my hometown, Law and Order, and Nancy Drew.

 Despite all of my wishes, the story did not begin with a leggy blonde entering my office with a trench coat on and nothing underneath. It didn't even end with a leggy blonde wearing a trench coat with nothing on underneath. The biggest tragedy that at no point during this story was there a leggy blonde wearing a trench coat with nothing on underneath.

It was a hot day, made worse by the fact that the Macaroni Hut that shared a wall with my office never actually turned off their stove during business hours. I had the window behind my desk open and the little fan focused on me. I had also taken off my shirt and was sitting behind my desk, only wearing a wifebeater. I assumed that it was going to be a slow day, since all days were slow days in this business.

My radio was balanced on the window sill. It was in between "Call Me Maybe" and "Payphone," while the DJ was trying to explain Mayor Mourinho's ban on 64 ounce sodas, even though in ninety-four degree heat, a cold Mountain Dew the size of a small swimming pool would have been perfect.

The buzzer went off. I worked out of an old building, so it was created before the advent of more sophisticated intercom systems, meaning that I couldn't ask whoever buzzed who it was. Usually, it was some Chinese food delivery guy, who had to slip menus underneath everyone's door. If I ever let in a murderer, I hadn't heard about it, so I had to assume I never did.

I pulled my t-shirt on, on the off chance that someone actually needed a private detective for whatever reason. I put my Internet Mahjong game on hold. If I wasn't careful, Li from Beijing was going to ruin my entire game.

To my utter surprise, there was a knock at my door and I opened it. A well-dressed man with brown hair and a ginger beard entered my office, looking quite confused and uncomfortable. He was sweating profusely, like he'd just sat in a sauna for a couple of hours. It was hot, but not that hot.

“Is there anything I can help you with?” I asked, trying to sound helpful, instead of mildly annoyed that I had to put my Mahjong on hold. As cases were not coming in with any regularity, Mahjong, both on the Internet and in Chinatown, had become one of my main sources of income.

“You're a detective?” the man asked condescendingly, despite his frazzled, yet put together appearance.

I nodded.

“You're which one? Benzema or Higuaín?”

“Benzema. My partner has moved onto greener pastures.”

“I got your business card from a coworker. He said you found out that his wife was cheating on him.”

“That's most of my work.”

“You must be a great boyfriend,” the man said, rather snidely despite him coming into my office, rather than me going out of my way to find him.

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry. I'm not exactly pleased to be here.”

“Why are you here?”

“I need a detective.”

“I assumed.”

“Don't sass me. I wouldn't be here if I was in the mood for getting sassed.”

I had never been told not to sass people, since old women were not within my work's usual target demographic. Usually, old ladies were not perpetuating insurance fraud that included jet skis and were usually using their ill-gotten money for motor scooters or whatever old people usually bought with their pensions.

“Sorry?”

“I need you to find my lover. He disappeared.”

I never had a missing person's case before. It would have been exciting, except for the fact that the missing guy's lover was standing right in front of me, clearly very concerned about where the man that he loved had gone off to. My job usually entailed finding out whether assholes were cheating on each other or finding out whether other assholes were using their scammed insurance money to buy jet skis. I was the slightly more expensive and less humiliating version of _Cheaters._

“Isn't this a job for the police?”

“You're a detective, aren't you?”

“I mean, it's a legal thing, though. If he's missing, wouldn't the police want to know?”

“I need a degree of discreetness that I'm sure the police will not provide.”

I decided to take the job, despite the fact that my newest client, this Spaniard named Xabi Alonso, was shadier than a sunburnt child under a beach umbrella.

“His name is Steven and I need him to be found.”

“When was the last time you saw Steven?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Are you sure you don't want to go to the police?”

“You don't think you can take care this yourself?”

“I can, but this is not really within my expertise.”

“Make it your expertise.”

I didn't really have the means to turn the money that Xabi Alonso's case represented down, so I agreed. I only had one other case on the horizon, so it wasn't like my time was valuable or anything. The other case was from some nutjob named Fernando Torres, who was worried that his boyfriend, Sergio Ramos, was cheating on him. It wasn't like he was wrong in being suspicious, since his boyfriend was most certainly cheating on him (they always were), but Torres kept calling me on what seemed like on an hourly basis. As if I would forget the first case to come through my doors in nearly two weeks. Well, it wasn't the only case, but it was the only case where the client could pay me with real money and not lottery tickets or drugs. Until Xabi Alonso's case came through, I was only working on Torres's case and that was only just a waiting game, really.

I learned that Torres's boyfriend, some lowlevel guy at Santiago Bernabéu Industries, some scientific testing company, was going on a “business” trip to the Jersey Shore. I had made plans to follow and hopefully take pictures of Torres's boyfriend canoodling with some random dude on the back of a jet ski. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this line of work had a lot of jet skis involved in it.

Xabi gave me the details on what felt like Steven's entire life. He was from Boston, but moved to New York for work. They met at some bar in Brooklyn, but they moved to the Upper East Side, since Xabi was some big-shot lawyer at some firm on Sixth Avenue. He didn't want to go to the police because his firm didn't know he was gay.

“I'll give you access to everything. Steven's car, our apartment. You ask for it and you'll have it.”

When I got back to my apartment in Yonkers, my roommate, Samir, was already settled onto the couch with a bowl of cereal, watching television, “Any new cases?”

“Missing persons case.”

“Shit, that's exciting,” Samir said, looking up from his bowl; his mouth was dripping with milk, “The best thing that happened to me was that I got a death threat from some lady in Mount Vernon.”

Samir was a telemarketer and was becoming far too comfortable with receiving death threats. We met at college; I was studying business and he was going to school to be a lawyer, but he graduated with a degree in political science and distaste for other people who shared his interests in both law and politics. We went to Columbia University, so it was safe to say that we were both severe disappointments to the school. Samir was, especially, considering I didn't even graduate. He did get his degree and was still working as a telemarketer, trying to sell novelty goods to the good people of Westchester County.

“So what do you think happened to the guy?”

“Probably dead, but I still have to look like I'm making an effort. This guy's worth big money.”

“How big?”

“Rent for the next couple of months.”

“For the apartment or the office?”

“I think I can cover both.”

“Fuck. If that's the case, I'll fucking look for the guy myself.”

Samir did help me out a few times with photographs or stake outs, since Gonzalo left, but he was not particularly excited by the lifestyle afforded by a private detective. The only thing that being a private detective was good for was being a pretty decent way to pick up girls at the bar, but anyone could say that they were a private detective without actually having to commit to a salary that was less than that of a telemarketer.

“I need an assistant, if that's what you're saying.”

“That's totally not what I'm saying.”

“Do you think I could get an intern?”

Samir laughed, “I can see you writing a proposal for accreditation, 'The tasks required for this position include taking pictures of adulterers having fun on jet skis.' Good luck on that.”

I did my internship for my degree at some accountancy firm and they told me to hire hookers for an office party, so I didn't really see the problem.

The next day, I went to the office to work on a plan for both of my investigations. Really, it just meant more Internet Mahjong. To my credit, I did write “STEVEN GERRARD—MISSING? DEAD?” across the top of my notepad. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

The buzzer went off again. I let whoever it was in again, but didn't bother to pull on my t-shirt over my wife beater, since getting another client in two days was bordering on impossible.

My office door opened for the second time in two days and I almost knocked over my antique of a computer trying to pull on my t-shirt. But it turned out that the person who entered was only a kid, some teenager. He probably lost his cat or something. Teenagers never had the money to pay me what I needed or deserved. I usually did try to help them out, but the last time I helped out some kid, it was to track down his cell phone that allegedly had some “pornographic” pictures of his underaged girlfriend. That kid tried to pay me in scratch-off lottery tickets. When the Major Case detectives found out, they made fun of me for weeks. I was only starting to live that particular incident down.

“Hello!” the kid looked excited, so I thought he was lost. There was a local drug dealer in one of the offices down the hall.

“Is there anything I can help you with?” I didn't even bother to tear myself from the Mahjong game. It was one of my few sources of income and I couldn't afford for Li from Beijing to fuck me over again.

“My name is Raphaël Varane. I'm a journalism student from the NYU,” the kid said, in French, which, despite having lived in the United States for most of my life, was music to my ears. He must have noticed my accent, “I want to help you with an investigation.”

“Why?” I asked, looking up. Those were usually the words of a drug dealer trying to cover up his own steps. I had been involved with that once. The Major Case detectives and their captain never shut up about that one.

“Because you're a detective.”

“No. I meant, why do you want to help with an investigation?”

“Because I want to be an investigative journalist. Like Woodward and Bernstein,” the kid smiled. He looked too nice to be a drug dealer.

“Why don't you follow them around?”

The kid's smile faltered, “I think they might be dead.”

“I don't cover Watergate or anything,” I said, “It's not very exciting.”

The kid said, “It's for a project. I get graded on it. My professor wants us to do something that we find really interesting. It's for my summer class.”

“I take pictures of people cheating on each other,” I replied, “If that's exciting to you, whatever. You can help if you want.”

I wanted to play my cards close to my chest. I didn't want the kid to know that I kind of needed him. I had the Torres case and the Alonso case, with the Alonso case requiring a lot of leg work. And I didn't even have to pay the kid, if it was for a school project. I had a way around both child labor laws and labor laws, in general.

“Awesome!” the kid said, straightening up, “You're the ninth private detective I've spoken to!”

“Ninth?” I didn't even know that I was competing with that many detectives in New York for actual detective work, let alone for the unpaid, unskilled labor of a teenaged French kid. Surely, I should have been his first choice, since we shared a common language. Well, I guess “Karim Benzema” didn't really let people in on the fact that I spoke French as a first language. Considering the phone book advertisement that I had printed up, I could have been from Algeria directly and no one would have been the wiser. Though, if I was actually from Algeria, I might as well have just closed up shop because then no one would want to hire me.

“You would have been the eleventh, but two of the other guys recently disappeared,” the kid said cheerfully, “They must have been involved with something really dark.”

The kid left his e-mail and his phone number, nearly skipping out of the office. I was the eleventh best in New York? It did explain why I usually only had drunks, crackheads, and other assorted lunatics coming into my office. Before Gonzalo left for the police department, we used to get a more respectable clientele, but apparently, it was hard for normal-seeming paranoid people to trust an Arabic name in New York.

After I closed up the office, I went to the police headquarters to ask around about Steven Gerrard. Even if Xabi Alonso didn't want me to talk to them, the police were obviously a pretty good resource on the goings-on of the criminal underworld. I barely had an in there, since most of the detectives thought I was terminally stupid, but one of the detectives liked having me around, mostly so he could make fun of me later.

“What's the newest case for you?” Cristiano Ronaldo asked, shaking my hand, “Are you on the case of the missing meth from One-Toothed Larry?'

“It's a missing persons case,” I replied, sitting down in the chair in front of his desk. He had a picture of himself, hanging up on the wall behind his desk. It was big and had the colors inverted, like an Andy Warhol print. Cristiano Ronaldo's dayglo face smirked down at me, like the picture knew I was stupid and unworthy of being in his office. His investigative partner, Fábio Coentrão said that Ronaldo ordered the print himself after he solved the Benítez robbery.

“Someone's moving up in the world,” Ronaldo smirked, as it was his default expression. He had the best solving percentage in the city, even though he was in Major Case. It was really annoying that someone that arrogant was the best in New York. There were rumors he was going to be transferred to Cold Case.

“His name is Steven Gerrard. Do you have anything in the system about him?”

Ronaldo checked on his computer and shook his head, “I've got nada. Kind of figures. If they're going to you, your clients are worried about in trouble with the police for something. Do you want to report him missing?”

“Nah. Just keep this under your hat, okay?”

Ronaldo shrugged, “Whatever.”

I thanked him and took the Subway to Grand Central Station. Old re-election posters from Mourinho's last campaign were peeling off of the windows.


	2. You Know Very Well Who You Are

 “What are we supposed to be looking for?” Raphaël asked, going through a stiff-smelling gym bag that had been in the trunk of Steven Gerrard's car for three weeks in the middle of July in a parking garage on the Upper East Side. I was looking through the center console, which was filled to the brim with gas station receipts.

“Business cards, stuff with blood on it, anything that looks like some guy who works at a bank wouldn't have.”

Raphaël made a face, pulling sweat-stained socks out of the bag, “Do you have a gun?”

“Do you think that a guy named Karim Benzema can get a gun in New York City?”

Raphaël didn't say anything, but I knew that he was secretly resentful that he wasn't in a car chase or macking on some femme fatale. Even if he wasn't, I surely was. When Gonzalo convinced me to take the licensing test, he said there'd be car chases, gunfights, girls, all the stuff from the movies. Instead, none of that stuff ever happened and Gonzalo joined the police department instead.

We were going to Jersey to wrap up the Torres case, so we'd enjoy the sun for a little bit, instead of almost melting in a parking garage, like we were at that moment, while going through Steven Gerrard's personal belongings. Maybe I'd even get to use the detective pick-up lines that I had developed over the years.

“Why aren't you with the police?” Raphaël asked, “You don't make a lot of money doing this.”

I shrugged, finding a business card at the bottom of the console compartment. It read “Stamford Bridge Worldwide,” with a blue design in the corner. I doubted its importance, since Steven Gerrard had written a McDonald's order on the back of it, but I stuck in my wallet, just in case we came across it later. I wasn't really sure on how to conduct a missing persons investigation, other than watching hours of _Law and Order: Criminal Intent_ and _Without a Trace_ , while working on accounting homework. All I did know was that it wasn't much like following around people until they started making out with someone who wasn't their spouse or significant other, so I was improvising. The gas station receipts didn't really seem juicy, largely useless because they were all from before three weeks ago.

“This guy is disgusting,” Raphaël declared after he found the third half-empty bottle of Gatorade that had begun developing its own bacterial species within its electric blue liquid.

“He's dead; it's not like he can clean out his own car.”

“How do you know he's dead?” Raphaël asked, tossing the gym bag back into the trunk, “This is, like, the first time you've gotten up from Mahjong in a week.”

“Most people who are missing are dead.”

“Yeah, but this guy might not be.”

“Who's the detective? Me or you?”

Raphaël slammed the trunk shut, “I didn't find anything unless being a slob is a clue.”

“It's not.”

“Good, I was worried about that,” Raphaël rolled his eyes. I opened the glove box; there was one of those cheap photo albums that only grandmothers bought. I flipped through it. There were pictures of who I assumed to be Steven Gerrard and his friends at Fenway Park. So Steven Gerrard was completely wrong about sports teams, in addition to being missing and possibly dead. Xabi wasn't in any of the pictures, but some bald, smiley guy and a thoroughly non-descript guy with brown hair were with Steven Gerrard in all of the pictures.

Raphaël took the Subway to Brooklyn, while I went north back to Yonkers. For the trip to Jersey, I was borrowing Samir's car. My own car had been repossessed a few months prior. If I wasn't getting tailed by a, for the lack of a better term, intern, I would have “borrowed” Gonzalo's car, to ensure him that I was having a grand old time without him, but I didn't want to completely give up on being a semi-competent role model for Raphaël.

On Friday, we started our two hour drive from Brooklyn to Seaside Heights. It was supposed to be two hours, but there was a traffic jam at the Brookyln Bridge, so we were stuck there for an extra hour, before I decided to try another route. There was a similarly horrible jam at the Verrazano on the way to the Outerbidge.

“This is probably the first time in years that anyone has been prevented from going to Staten Island,” Raphaël said, looking at the window.

“What's wrong with Staten?”

“Oh Christ, you're from there, aren't you?”

“Yeah and? What's wrong with Staten Island?”

Raphaël snorted, “It does explain a lot. Did you hang out with a lot of guidos as a kid? Because that would explain most of your clothing choices and music choices.”

“What's wrong with my music?”

“I thought private detectives were supposed to listen to jazz. Not shitty rap. Where's Tupac?”

“First of all, it's not shitty. I listen to a wide variety of rap and hip hop. We don't listen to Tupac in this car because Tupac is a West Coast rapper and that shit doesn't fly in this car, bro.”

“It's not even your car.”

“Samir agrees with me. We're Biggie fans,” I replied, even though Samir didn't really care all that much. He probably wouldn't have even noticed if someone played a Tupac song. Samir didn't even know that Jay-Z was from Brooklyn, but Samir grew up in Buffalo, so I had to make excuses for him.

“You never told me why you aren't a police officer. You wouldn't have to borrow someone's car if you were a police officer.”

“I don't want to be a police officer,” I replied.

“Why? You'd be doing the same thing, but you actually get paid.”

I snorted, “I wouldn't be going to Jersey to take photos of some assholes trying to fuck each other, if I was a police officer.”

“So you prefer this to actual detective work.”

“It's easy and it's decent money when people are coming in.”

“You don't have a car.”

“So? There's more to life than having a car.”

“How many women want to date a guy who doesn't have a car?”

“Have you been to Manhattan? No one has a car and there are plenty of dudes getting action in Manhattan.”

“If they live in Manhattan. You live in Yonkers and you don't have a car. It's a level of pathetic.”

“Well, I got some pick-up lines. And they work, kiddo.”

When we got to Seaside Heights, I parked Samir's car in a spot with a parking meter in front of a beach house. We walked to the boardwalk, pushing past tourists who were looking for the house form _The Jersey Shore._ When we got onto the boardwalk, there were more tourists taking pictures in front of the Shore Shack. Some of my friends from home were dedicated to their summers at the Jersey Shore. My parents were fans of the beaches on Long Island, so I had only been to the Jersey Shore with my Italian friends, who were largely outraged by the bad reputation their beloved summer vacation spot had gotten, apparently unaware of what people had been saying about the Jersey Shore for years. My other friends, whose families had always gone to Long Island, gloated.

We got onto the beach, after paying five dollars for each pass. I told Raphaël to look for Torres's boyfriend, while I looked around for my own enjoyment. I saw something slightly more exciting than Torres's boyfriend, so I handed my camera, one of those expensive ones with a telescoping lens, off to Raphaël. I bought it when business was better.

I kicked at Ronaldo's foot, since he was asleep on a towel, wearing dayglo blue booty shorts. The guy he was napping next to wasn't his usual type, which was abbed up, orange, and slightly guido. This particular guy was short, with the face of a lost child; Ronaldo's friend was a normal person color and wearing a normal person bathing suit. Ronaldo sat up, rubbing his eyes, “What the fuck are you wearing, Benzema? Are those jorts?”

“Never mind what I'm wearing, what are you doing here?”

“So I'm not allowed to go on vacation now? I didn't realize you were my new captain.”

“Who's your boyfriend?”

Ronaldo looked down at his sleeping friend, “I'll explain later.”

“What's his name?”

“His name is 'none of your fucking business,'” Ronaldo snapped, glancing at his little friend, “I'll explain in New York. Not that it's any of your business, anyway. I'm not exactly proud of this. What are you doing in Jersey, anyway?”

“I'm looking for some guy who's cheating on his boyfriend,” I replied.

“Sounds riveting,” Ronaldo leaned back, picking up his sunglasses off of the beach towel, “Get lost. You're standing in my sun.”

Raphaël and I found Torres's boyfriend and his friend pretty easily. Torres's boyfriend, Sergio Ramos, wasn't the kind of guy who was secretive by any means, which only meant that getting a picture of him and his buddy, some skinny guy with big eyes, was really easy. Unfortunately, they didn't have a jet ski.

“Now what?” Raphaël asked, handing me my camera back.

“Now, we celebrate. Are you old enough to drink?”

“Aren't you a Muslim?”

“So? Are you old enough to drink?”

“No.”

“You can watch me drink, then. Looks like you're the designated driver.”

There was a bar on the boardwalk, near Casino Pier. It was full of tourists, a lot of them speaking with Southern accents or flattened Ohioan accents. The theme of the bar was tourist kitsch, it looked like, so there were pictures of local youth football teams screwed onto the walls, along with other countries' flags. Kind of like an independently-owned Applebee's.

I sat down at a high table with Raphaël. I had secured myself a beer, while Raphaël watched with a slight jealousy. It wasn't my fault that he hadn't procured a decent fake for himself. I reminisced on the halcyon days when Samir, Gonzalo, and I all had fakes. Gonzalo's was of some Irish kid that one of my older brothers knew. Samir's was his cousin. My own brothers declined to pass me down one of theirs, so I got one made from a place in Staten that made fakes from Montana. It was unfortunate that Gonzalo had to go off and be responsible, since we used to have a lot of fun together, all three of us.

“I would have figured it was harder to actually solve a case.”

“It's never a mystery if people are cheating on each other. They always are.”

“That's very sad to hear,” Raphaël said, taking a sip of beer.

“Well, when you get to the point that you're hiring a private detective to follow your boyfriend or girlfriend around, it's not a relationship worth saving, is it?”

Raphaël shrugged.

“Does the private detective line actually work?”

“Do you want proof?”

“Yeah,” Raphaël looked around and chose a woman. Most of the women at the bar were with a partner of some kind, but I saw the only one who was sitting alone. She was in a corner booth, playing around on her cell phone. I approached her table.

She didn't even look up, “I'm not interested.”

“How do you know what I was even going to say?”

“Because I'm not a moron. I'm not up for continuing this conversation.”

“Would you be interested if I bought you a drink?”

“More interested than at the current moment,” the woman didn't look up from her phone during the entire exchange.

“Is there anything you want?”

“Surprise me. If you impress me, maybe we'll talk.”

The woman didn't seem like she drank the fruity drinks that I used to indulge in back in New York during college, so I bought her a scotch and set it down in front of her. It was three times as expensive as my beer was, so I hoped she was worth it. She looked at the drink and then up at me, “Good guess, cowboy. You may join me.”

I sat down across from the woman as she set her cell phone down on the table. She picked up her scotch and took a sip, “How'd you guess I liked scotch?'

“I'm a detective.”

She snorted, looking away from me.

“No, really. I am one.”

“I didn't know that the dress code for detectives included jorts.”

“I'm a private investigator. It's a much looser dress code,” I said.

“Good Lord,” she sighed, “So what drove you to this profession? Dead sister who you couldn't save?”

“This conversation just got very dark,” I remarked.

The woman shrugged, taking another sip of the scotch, “You're in a dark profession. I've met a lot of 'private investigators.' They all have some tortured past, like getting kicked out of the police department because alcoholism or whatever. What's yours?”

“I don't have one.”

“No dead little sisters?”

“Eight brothers and sisters. They're all still alive and well.”

She said, “Good for you. There's too many people in your job who are trying to save people who are already dead.”

I didn't know what to say. The woman said, smiling slightly, “I'm sorry. I'm bad at small talk.”

“Small talk is the only thing I'm good at.”

“At least we figured out that we're utterly incompatible already.”

“Already? Were you thinking of something I wasn't?”

“You weren't thinking of just leaving your friend and possibly finding a hotel room?” she nodded towards Raphaël, “Because it's quick, but we could do whatever we want. It _is_ the Jersey Shore, you know.”

“It sounds like a decent proposal. I'll have to consider it,” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table. Her foot hooked around my ankle.

“I just have to ask you. Before you know. Before we get married,” she said, winking, “Are you a drug addict? Ex-con? Ever done any serious jail time?”

“Do you attract that kind of guy?”

“Depends on how you answer.”

A woman with short bleached-blonde hair, who was normal lady height, walked up to the table and nodded to my new friend.

My new friend smiled at me tightly, “Sorry. I've got this thing.”

I said, “Wow. Dumped in ten minutes. That's a record for me.”

She stood, picking her cell phone up, cooing, “Don't worry. It's not you, it's me. You're cute. You'll find another girl at this bar.”

My new friend and the bleach-blonde woman left the bar. I went back to sit with Raphaël, who was laughing, “Damn. I thought you had her.”

I drank for a while longer, hanging around with Raphaël, waiting for something exciting to happen.


	3. Just a Backstreet Gambler With the Luck to Lose.

 The bar got filled up at around midnight. I was running out of dollar bills and Raphaël didn't have anymore change to put in the meter. I emptied my wallet to find any spare quarters or dimes that might have been floating around in there. I disregarded pennies and nickels altogether. Steven Gerrard's “Stamford Bridge Worldwide” card slipped out onto the table, so I picked it up, studying it for a minute.

> STAMFORD BRIDGE WORLDWIDE, LLC.  
> 
> 
> London, England, UK

The blue design on the corner was an Eye of Horus, like the kind from Pyramid walls. It looked oddly familiar and not just because I've seen an Eye of Horus before. I just couldn't place it. I shoved the card back into my wallet and gathered up my remaining change to buy another beer. The bar was far more crowded than it had been just an hour before, when I got rejected. I pushed my way through the crowd and found an empty spot at the bar, where the bartender filled up another glass of beer. While I was collecting my glass, I saw the Stamford Bridge Worldwide design again. It was on the back of some guy's hand. The guy was standing around with his crew, all clad in blue and speaking with weird accents.

I hadn't realized my recognition of the design had been so immediate. I thought it had been something I had seen before I got to Seaside Heights.

I tried to sound casual when I nudged the guy with the hand tattoo, “So what's up with Stamford Bridge? Is it an LLC or what?”

He had the face of a forty-four year old football hooligan and the body of a twenty-eight year old man. He didn't seem to fit together, as a person. The guy looked at me, like I had grown an extra head, “What are you talking about?”

To be fair to the guy, I was babbling. I said, “An LLC? A limited liability company? A non-publicly traded company with or without private shareholders?”

The guy glared at me, “How the fuck do you know about Stamford Bridge?”

It was then that I realized I had made a huge mistake, but I couldn't stop talking. The business major that lived in my mouth kept wanting to talk, “Did you know in Spain, LLCs are called sociedades de responsibilidad limitada, or SLs for short?”

The guy poked at one of his friends, who was a little chunky, to turn around, “Lamps, I think this kid's making fun of us.”

The guys were crowding around me, but I couldn't stop talking about LLCs, “I bet you guys didn't know that you could have the corporate structure that could grant you shareholders.”

It was pretty clear that these guys were not interested in or capable of changing a company's tax structure, so I tried to back up, drinking my beer, like it was normal. That the situation I managed to get myself into was normal.

“I have to go,” I said.

“This Culé keeps talking about Stamford Bridge,” the original man I spoke to said. I looked down; I hadn't realized it, but I was wearing a blue and red striped shirt, colors of the Culés, a gang that had migrated from Manhattan out to Jersey after it got to expensive to stick around in the City, kind of like the Mafia, but much less focused on the big stuff, like money laundering, and more focused on fighting Giants fans after the Jets lost, which was almost every weekend in the Fall.

The chunky one, Lamps, grabbed my shirt, pulling my face close to his, so much so he was breathing on my eyes. It was far too late to pretend that I couldn't speak English, edging closer and closer to the “faking a seizure” level on the desperation measure. He asked, “What do you know about Stamford Bridge?”

“Nothing really. I promise.”

Lamps looked to the original guy I spoke to, “John, do you believe him?”

I wanted to collect my camera and Raphaël and flee into the night before they could actually kill me. As an experienced coward, I was very in favor of not dying on the behalf of a half-assed lead that really was just probably coincidence, considering Steven Gerrard found Stamford Bridge Worldwide so insignificant he wrote that he wanted a _Big Mac, med fries, and a med coke_ on the back of their business card. It was entirely possible that Steven Gerrard's coworkers gave him the card while he went on a lunch run or something.

“Karim!” Raphaël had pushed his way into the fray, holding my camera. The original guy I spoke to, John, grabbed my camera out of Raphaël's hands.

“Do you know what we do to Culés?” the guy demanded, before smashing my camera into the ground. The lens popped off. It was official: I had somehow stumbled onto the set of the weirdest version of _Scared Straight_ ever. Not that I had been planning to join a gang, but still. I knew at the moment that I never would.

“What are you doing?” a different voice entered the conversation. I looked up from my uncomfortable position near Lamps's face. It was an actual Culé with legitimate Culé attire; he had long, caveman curly hair. He had friends, similarly dressed, behind him; all of his friends were hobbit-sized. Lamps let go of me and swung at the real Culé. Chairs were being thrown, bottles broken.

I grabbed Raphaël's arm and we booked it out of the bar, off of the boardwalk and out of Seaside Heights.

“Jesus Christ!” Raphaël said when we were on the highway out of Ocean County, finally breaking the keyed up silence.

It had gone straight from decent night to complete nightmare. I got to play footsy with an attractive woman, and then I started a gang fight. Except for the part where my camera got destroyed by some psychopath with a hand tattoo, it was the kind of adventure that seventeen year old Karim would have loved to have been witness to.

Except twenty-four year old Karim found it much more difficult to overlook the fact that my camera, one of my few sources of income, had gotten spiked by a gang member with a hand tattoo. Every time my life got into some semblance of order, something like that had to happen.  Sometimes, in the form of a gang member with a hand tattoo destroying my belongings, other times, in the form of a clown stealing my car, shortly before it got repossessed.

“We have to go back.”

“You want to go back, now?”

“I need the money from Torres.”

“Your camera's busted though.”

“We need to stop at a CVS, too. I'll get one of those shitty ones with the paper cases.”

“You don't have one on your phone?”

“My computer was made in 2002. What makes you think my cellphone can take usable pictures?”

“There are children that were born after your computer was made that are in middle school. I hope you reflect on that,” Raphaël said, taking the exit to go back into Ocean County, “You can use my phone.”

I didn't know what we were supposed to do, considering it was four o'clock in the morning and I doubted that Ramos and his supposedly secret lover were going to be up before noon. I wasn't even sure if we would be welcome back to Seaside Heights, all things considered. I was, also concerned with the fact that there were gang members who destroyed my belongings and possibly wanting to kill me. We sat on the trunk of Samir's car in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, drinking coffee. I was leaning against the rear window, looking up at the night sky, while Raphaël seemed a bit more uncomfortable with siting on Samir's car.

“What do we do now?”

“It's hard to say,” I replied, “I've never had to deal with this specific situation before.”

Raphaël shrugged. I shrugged back, still sort of drunk, “I guess we'll go back to the Shore.”

“Don't call it that,” Raphaël rolled his eyes.

“It's the closest shore, thus it is the Shore. A definitive shore, if you will.”

“You sound like the tools from TV.”

“So? I'm from Staten Island. It comes with the territory.”

“But you're not really from Staten Island, though. Your accent is weird for Staten Island and you speak French,” Raphaël said.

“I was born in France, but my family is Algerian. We moved here when I was a kid. What about you? You speak French too.”

“My parents are from Martinique. We live in Connecticut.”

“That figures.”

“Why does that figure?”

“You're a hipster. It figures you're from New England.”

“Well, it figures you are from Staten Island, so it all equals out.”

I knew where Ramos was staying, as he checked in on FourSquare, before we left the City, which I assumed would have been the last thing done, considering he was cheating on his insane boyfriend, so that was where we made our way to, over the course of the pre-dawn morning.

At ten AM, we went into the Seaside Heights Comfort Inn, hoping that Ramos and his secret partner couldn't withstand the allure of a free subpar continental breakfast. It was the usual crowd of early risers who were hoping to scrimp on meals to fully enjoy their vacation at the Shore, but again, I ran into the least likely police detective to enjoy a stale English muffin for breakfast sitting across from his little friend at a four person table.

I sat next to Ronaldo, while Raphaël hesitated. Ronaldo sighed loudly, “For real? You can't bother me some other time, Benzema?”

His little friend smiled; his button eyes brightened, “I don't know any of Cris's friends, yet! I'm Leo.”

He offered his hand. I said, “Karim,” just as Ronaldo affirmed, “I'm not this man's friend.”

“I wouldn't have pegged you for a Comfort Inn fan,” I said, noting that Ronaldo was wearing .

“Well, you know, considering my civil servant salary, I should be staying the Waldorf Astoria, shouldn't I? Pissing in gold toilet bowls and eating caviar.”

I waved at Raphaël to sit down, but he seemed less than comfortable and hovered near the juice dispenser, pretending to be very interested in his phone.

“Are you with the NYPD, too?” Leo asked.

Ronaldo laughed so hard, he nearly started gasping for breath, “Oh my God, no. He's a PI.”

“Oh,” Leo said, his smile fading, “How interesting.”

“Leo's with Organized Crime. He's a real detective,” Ronaldo informed me helpfully, “Why are you here? Are you so incompetent that you couldn't take your stupid pictures yesterday?”

“Funny you should bring that up. I did take my pictures yesterday, but there was a gang fight. Leo, I'm sure you know how these things go. Long story short, my camera got broken and I have to take another picture.”

“You fucking would,” Ronaldo rubbed his forehead. He looked to Leo, “I should explain. Remember when I told you about that stupid asshole who let a drug dealer help him investigate his own case? Benzema, here, is that stupid asshole.”

Leo snorted slightly, “Who were the gangs in your fight?”

“The Culés and some guys who had blue tattoos on their hands.”

Leo tugged at his lip, “That's not good. I was undercover with the Culés a few years ago. We might have to go back to New York, if they're still around.”

Ronaldo looked at me, sneering, “You had to ruin my vacation, didn't you? I don't get off again until October. Do you know how shitty the Jersey Shore is in October? I'll give you an answer. It's really shitty.”

“You could go to Orient Point, out on the Island,” I suggested, “That's supposed to be really nice during the fall.”

“That's not the point.”

“They might have all gotten arrested. We pulled a runner before police intervened.”

Ramos and his secret lover entered the continental breakfast nook. Raphaël noticed as well and focused his phone on them, as they nuzzled next to the coffee maker, near the collection of bruised fruit. I stood up, “Well, it was great meeting you, Leo. And it was wonderful ruining your vacation, Ronaldo. Au revoir.”

Raphaël and I went to the exit, finally able to leave Seaside Heights. Being stuck there with gang members, Ronaldo, his new boyfriend, Ramos, and his secret lover was pretty much Hell. Well, it started out well, but slowly descended into awfulness.

We were about to get into Samir's car, when some tall guy with a goatee and mustache hit the hood of the car. He had a German accent, “You two should be careful around here.”

“Don't worry. We're not coming back to this hell hole,” I assured him.

After I pulled out of the Comfort Inn parking lot, Raphaël said, “I think that guy was trying to threaten us.”

I supposed it was entirely possible.


	4. Gonna Look in Every Corner of the City.

Samir got his car back with little damage, considering we did escape from gang members at one point during our weekend.  Other than a cigarette burn on the imitation leather of the front seat, it was pretty much perfect.  It was my fault, since I enjoy a good smoke while drunk, but I was going to blame it on a gang member.  If Samir didn't believe me, I was going to throw Raphaël under the bus.  I didn't know him that well, so I didn't really care if our friendship was lost because of it.

I spent the morning in my office, since the afternoon, I was supposed to meet Torres about the pictures of Ramos and his secret lover.  Like usual, I was not particularly concerned with actually working, so I was playing Mahjong against Li from Beijing and he was already fucking me over.

I went to a deli near my office for lunch and yet again, I ran into Ronaldo, "It turns out you've ignited a gang war.  Leo's consulting with the Ocean County PD."

"How'd the rest of your weekend go?"

"Well, he gave me the best blow job of my life, so I can't complain," Ronaldo shrugged, picking up his sandwich thoughtfully.  I was starting to suspect that every I knew was, in fact, gay.

"Did you hear about the missing PIs?" Ronaldo asked, not even letting me remark on his previous comment, thought I doubted I actually needed to or wanted to.  He continued, "They found one of them in the trunk of a stolen car."

"Fuck me."

"I know.  Well, they've got Falcao on the case.  So you're relying on the third best detective in the city to prevent your eventual murder," Ronaldo smirked, as usual.

"Who's the second?  I'm assuming you're the first."

"Leo."

I was walking to the Subway, on my way to go see Torres, when I got a phone call from Xabi, "I was checking my bank statement and there was a withdrawal on Steven's card today.  I called the bank and they told me where the money was withdrawn from."

He gave me the address, so I took a different Subway, texting Torres that I was going to be late.  Raphaël was going to Xabi and Steven Gerrard's apartment after his class to look through Steven Gerrard's desk, so other than the meeting with Torres, I didn't really have all that much to do.

When I emerged from the Subway, I realized that I was in a really bad part of town.  There were hookers all over the place.  Not just lady hookers, either.  Dude hookers were lurking next to building stoops and leaning against walls sullenly, alongside their female counterparts.  I walked on the curb, trying to stay as far away from the "loose" people as possible without walking in the street.  I'm sure they were lovely people, but they weren't worth the trouble.

The lone ATM on the street was one of those far-flung random ones with a dodgy bank, "Manhattan Island Bank" taking responsibility for it.  Anyone who used it was probably either extremely desperate for a fuck or begging for their identity to be stolen.

I stood in front of the ATM, not sure of what to look for.  There wasn't any blood splatter or physical clues.  As a detective whose biggest cases were my biggest failures, it was difficult to see if this was going to pan out well for for Steven Gerrard or Xabi.  Even if Steven Gerrard was still alive, by the time I found him, he was probably going to be dead.  If I ever found him.  Considering crime statistics, it was highly likely that I would be searching for the rest of my life.  At least, Raphaël would have an interesting project to turn into his professor.  He could title it "Why You Should Always Go to the Police."  But I needed money in a bad way, so I wasn't going to give it up.

"Looking for a good time, cowboy?" one of the male hookers had approached me and was leaning against the ATM's vertical sign that was supposed to prevent people from watching you input your PIN.  He was very short and had a mole on his chin.

"You're not in my wheelhouse, hombre," I replied.  He rolled his eyes at me.  I asked, "Have you seen anyone at this ATM six to seven hours ago, by any chance?"

"Even if I did, how would guarantee that I remember?" he crossed his arms.  The little man hooker was wearing neon pink dolphin shorts, a mesh tank top, and flip flops.  He reminded me of a satyr from old Greek and Roman myths, except he clearly had human legs, instead of goat legs; he even had a little beard.  I guess it made sense that he was a hooker, since satyrs were supposed to bone everyone and everything.

"I'm trying to help out my friend.  His credit card got stolen."

"What's your friend doing in this part of town?"

"He wasn't here.  Someone stole his credit card and used it here."

"I don't think I can help you out.  Unless you're willing to pay up."

I did have a ten dollar bill crumpled up in my pocket, but I wasn't entirely comfortable with paying a hooker, regardless of purpose, "I would, but I can't."

"You don't have any money?" the little man hooker jutted his thumb towards the ATM.

"You have to be careful with ATMs.  Your identity can be stolen with them."

"I like your shirt," he said.  I was wearing a Young Hov t-shirt, which had to be three sizes too big for his petite, goat-man frame.

"I'm six inches taller than you."

"But you don't want to pay a hooker.  So you have to give me stuff.  That's how that detective got around the law," he said.

I rolled my eyes and took off my shirt, handing it to the little man hooker.  I did have a wife beater on underneath, so I wasn't going to be wondering around Manhattan completely shirtless.  He took it, smirking, tossing the shirt over his shoulder, "The only guy that used that ATM today was a white guy, wearing a blue shirt."

He smiled like he gave me the tip of the century.

"Wait a fucking second.  That's it?" I gave up my shirt for a tip about a man's race and his shirt color.  In a city of eight million, there had to be hundreds of white guys with blue shirts, if not thousands, possibly even millions.

"Yeah," the little man hooker said, scratching his arm pit, "It's the truth."

"I'm not doubting that you're telling the truth, but it's hardly worth my shirt," I said, reaching to tug my shirt off of the guy's shoulder.  He stepped back away from me.

"You have another shirt on."

“But I still bought that shirt for myself.”

“You're low, you know that.  Trying to steal from a guy whose life choices have lead him to selling sex for money.”

“If we're going to compare poor life choices, bro, my poor life choices blow yours out of the water!”

“Really?  That's the argument you're going to choose?”

“I'll throw down, bro!  I don't care.”

“I'm a prostitute.”

“Well, a circus clown stole my car once.”

“I'm a prostitute.”

“My ex-girlfriend broke up with by telling me that she was dying of kidney failure.”

“I'm a prostitute.”

Suddenly, the street started vacating.  The little hooker that had stolen my shirt for the World's worst tip skipped out with the other hookers, but before leaving, he smacked me, pretty hard across my left cheek.  Two police officers were strolling along their beat, as I stood in a wasteland that had recently been a bustling center of prostitution, holding my cheek.

“Karim?”

The police officers were Gonzalo and his beat partner, Raúl Albiol.  Gonzalo looked quite scandalized, “What are you doing here, Karim?  You shouldn't be here!”

"I'm just walking."

"In a known pick-up area?" Raúl asked, glancing at Gonzalo moodily.  Raúl had sex with Gonzalo, but to be fair to Gonzalo, it was standard operating procedure for him.  There very few people Gonzalo didn't have sex with.  Gonzalo didn't even go to the same college as Samir and me, but he still managed to have sex with two of our professors, our third roommate (before he moved out), and our RA.  Samir and I probably two of the few people in New York that Gonzalo hadn't fucked.

I think Gonzalo even had sex with Ronaldo, since Ronaldo always referred to him as "your friend with the fat ass."  Usually, he didn't only refer to people by distinguishing features like that, unless he hit it and quit it.  Ronaldo saw Coentrão every day, since they were investigative partners, but Ronaldo still called him "Skunky," because Coentrão dyed his hair sometimes and usually had dark roots.  Leo was probably on borrowed time, only referred to as "Leo" until they broke up, then he'd probably be"Shrimpy" or "Frodo."

"I can't walk places anymore?" I asked.

"Come on, Karim.  We're not going to get you in trouble.  You can tell me if you were trying to hire a hooker," Gonzalo said.

"I wasn't."

"Whatever," he said, like he didn't believe me, "Samir and I are hanging out tonight.  Are you going to be around?"

"Sorry.  I have some other stuff to work on tonight, bro," I replied.

"I'll see you some other time, then,” Gonzalo said, grabbing my shoulder and squeezing.  He and Raúl walked off along their beat.  Raphaël was going to Xabi's apartment after his class to look through some of Steven Gerrard's stuff, like his desk and we were supposed to meet an hour at my office.  I didn't have enough time to go to Brooklyn to meet Torres, so I put off meeting him until much later, so I went back to the office to work on some Mahjong in the mean time.

Raphaël came by at six o'clock, “I think I got something.  Like something that a detective from _Law and Order_ would find.”

“What?” I asked, closing my Mahjong game, finally ahead for once.

“A key for a PO box.  92240.”

“Did you follow up which post office that it's at?”

“One on 70th street,” Raphaël said, “I got a thing tonight.  You mind if I don't follow along?”

“We could do it tomorrow, too, if you want.  It's not like there's a deadline for this,” I replied, “I have to go see Torres anyway.  I can't keep putting off seeing him.”

We took the Subway to Brooklyn and parted ways in Williamsburg.  I went down to Dyker Heights, while Raphaël hung around with his hipster friends, probably to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and read _Pitchfork_ or whatever hipsters did.  Sway soulfully to unlistenable alternative rock, maybe?

Torres was not particularly pleased to meet his hired private investigator, while he was wearing a wife beater, although I guess my shirt from earlier was bordering on less than appropriate anyway, as well.

He flipped through the photos that Raphaël took in the Comfort Inn breakfast nook, “You didn't get the guy's face.  None of these pictures have the guy's face.”

“You wanted to prove that your boyfriend was cheating, didn't you?”

“Whatever, it's fine,” Torres said, taking his checkbook out of a chest of drawers in the living room.  He tore out a check and I stuck it in my wallet as soon as it left his hand.  He rubbed his mouth, while he yawned.  He had a blue Eye of Horus tattooed on his hand, “So that's it, huh?”

I nodded.  As I went back to Yonkers, I wondered if he knew that I was almost killed by his fellow gang members.

It was only about nine o'clock when I got back to the apartment, so I had slightly overestimated my level of activity to Gonzalo, but there was a Yankees game in LA to watch, so I didn't feel too bad that I had missed out on whatever Samir and Gonzalo were going to do.  Assumedly, they were going to hang around in Manhattan, at gay bars or something.  Not that I really felt that bad about not hanging out with Gonzalo, anyway; I did feel bad that I was going to miss out on free drinks.  He was the one who left our business to work for the police.  I was more than a little bitter, still.

I opened the apartment door and immediately saw pale man-ass bobbing up and down on our couch.

"Oh fuck!" I slammed the door on myself.  Everyone was fucking each other behind my back, weren't they?

I wasn't exactly certain whose ass I had seen; I wasn't exactly an expert in ass identification.  I was hoping that Samir was renting out our apartment to strangers for sexual purposes, like those by-the-hour motels, but out of our apartment.  I would have actually preferred there to be an orgy in there, over the possibility that Samir and Gonzalo were fucking each other on the couch that Samir and I had picked up on a tip from Craig's List in 2007.

"Karim?" the door opened and Samir's head poked out from behind the door, "Are you okay out here?"

"Are you both dressed?"

"Our genitals are covered.  Is that enough?"

I went inside and both of them were wearing their underpants.  Samir did start pulling on the rest of his clothes, while I stayed far from our couch, "I've had meals on that couch."

It was official.  Gonzalo had fucked everyone that we knew.  Everyone apart from me, but I wasn't itching to fuck Gonzalo anyhow.  I had known him too long and knew too many things about him; there was also the fact that I was straight, but for Gonzalo, that kind of sexual preference was secondary.  Samir said, "We didn't expect to come back this early."

"No shit."

"You said that you were going to be out late," Gonzalo said, actually sitting down on the couch.  The couch that was seeping with their love juices.  The couch that we were going to have to get rid of.  I didn't mind living without furniture; that kind of lifestyle was perfectly fine with me.

"Plans change.  That doesn't mean you should start fucking each  other on our couch!  I've eaten meals on that couch!"

"Are you upset with us being in a relationship?" Samir asked, desperately trying to act like a concerned father-figure, instead of my roommate, who had boned my childhood friend on a piece of furniture that I had used almost every day.

"Hold up, bro," I said, leaning against the wall, "Pipita's in a relationship, now?"

"Jesus Christ, it's not that unbelievable," Gonzalo sneered, kicking his feet up on the coffee table.  He still hadn't put clothes on, besides his underpants.

"I'm not upset about you fucking each other.  I'm upset that you two fucked on the couch.  I've eaten there."

"You fucked that one girl in our bathroom once."

"Unless you eat dinner in the bathroom, I don't really see the problem," I said.  Unfortunately, another thought struck me, "What about the stain that you said was from toothpaste?  Oh my God.  I've sat on that stain!"

Samir sat down next to Gonzalo, resting his hand on Gonzalo's knee; Gonzalo had his arm around Samir's shoulders.  Gonzalo said, “You're just jealous that you don't have a girlfriend.”

“You know, I'm living out a statistical improbability,” I said, “Everyone in my social circle is a gay man.”

“We're your only friends,” Gonzalo said, pressing his forehead into the crook of Samir's neck, “So yeah, I believe you.”

My life had already been slightly odd, but it turned out my friends weren't safe from the strangeness of everything either.


	5. Walk on the Wild Side

 The next morning, I woke up early after being unable to sleep for much of the night. Gonzalo had slept over and all three of us made awkward small talk at the kitchen table. Samir and Gonzalo toddled around the apartment like grandpas who had been together for years, which made me question just exactly how long this romance had been going on for. I actually didn't want to know. They wouldn't have ever met had I not been involved.

Samir acted like my gay dad and tried to ascertain whether I was “okay” with the new relationship arrangement, “We didn't want to tell you.”

At least they were thinking of my feelings. I asked, “What's the appeal? You do remember the time when he had like four boyfriends at once, right?”

Samir glanced at Gonzalo, who was eating potato chips and laughing at something on television simultaneously. It was like looking back into college, when Gonzalo and Ezequiel were a “thing” and had really loud, awful sex in the room that Ángel and Ezequiel were supposed to share. Ángel would sleep in the common room of our suite, while my bed was along the same wall as Ezequiel's bed. Gonzalo essentially lived with us, despite the fact that he didn't pay room and board or even attend Columbia University. He rarely wore a shirt and ate most of our food. I often got back from classes to find Gonzalo watching CourtTV in his sweatpants and no shirt, covered in a thin layer of Oreo crumbs. After a while, he switched from Ezequiel to Ángel. And I guess, ultimately Samir.

“You don't understand the power of that ass, do you?”

I clearly did not. It was official, of the four people that lived in our suite in my freshman year of college, I was the only who hadn't had sex with Gonzalo.

For the most part, I had gotten over being the only straight man in my social circle while still in college. For unknown reasons, ever since I was in high school, I was a real dick magnet. I couldn't explain it. Gonzalo and I would be playing basketball or I'd be on the bus going back to Staten Island when a man, usually in his mid-to-late thirties would approach me to talk about fucking. I was clearly jailbait, with my acne and lollypop-shaped head.

It figured that I would get randomly assigned to live with three gay guys in their late teens. Gonzalo tagged along on moving day with me and my older brother, allegedly to help me bring my suitcases up to the fourth floor. He didn't pick up a collapsable laundry basket; instead, preferring to talk to the residence hall advisor, flirting with him. It wasn't really a surprise for my brother or me; we both knew that Gonzalo was on the prowl.

I met Raphaël at the post office. Raphaël smelled like menthol cigarettes and had fluorescent paint remnants in the roots of his hair. I nudged him as we walked inside, “Have a fun night last night?”

He looked like Hell and said, “My roommates had a paint party. I didn't go to sleep until five o'clock this morning.”

“I remember those days,” I said fondly, though my college days were only two years ago. I hadn't really stopped getting drunk for no reason, but it was nice to reminisce.

We found the box and used the key that Raphaël took from Steven Gerrard's desk.

The box was crammed full of stuff. I pulled the wad of envelopes and advertisements out and dumped them onto the table where you were supposed to write addresses and fill out forms. It was mostly Penny Savers and some official looking credit card advertisements.

I pulled one of the envelopes out of the pile and started ripping it open with my key.

“Isn't it illegal to open other people's mail?” Raphaël asked, pulling a paint chip out from his hair.

I flipped the envelope to show that there were no stamp on it, “Someone put this there. It wasn't delivered.”

I pulled a looseleaf piece of paper out of the envelope. It still had the holes on the side from where it had been ripped from one of those spiral-bound notebooks. The handwriting was chicken scratch.

> Stevie-
> 
> We moved the drive to Holy Apostles.
> 
> -J.C.

“Holy Apostles?”

“It's a church on Ninth and Twenty-Eighth.”

We took the Subway to the Church of the Holy Apostles. We got seats, since it was the middle of the day and not rush hour. I tried to explain about Gonzalo and Samir, since it was the major situation on my mind, which probably wasn't good, considering I was supposed to be focusing on a human being who had gone missing and was probably dead. Raphaël said, “Maybe you shouldn't be so jealous of them.”

“I'm not jealous of them. I'm concerned that I will eventually have to stop being their friends when they break up and tell me about unnecessary details about their love lives.”

“Well, when was the last time you had a girlfriend?”

I had the same girlfriend throughout high school and college. It wasn't really passionate and I don't think we loved each other. It was just fine, as far as young romance went, but I think we got past the point of being able to break up without causing a severe rift in our social groups. Eventually, she broke up with me by telling me that she was going to die of kidney failure because she didn't want me to feel bad about the whole thing. I had been self-exiled from normal society at the time, so she probably could have just broken up with me and I wouldn't have said anything anyway. It was kind of a mess and the harbinger of the mess that my life would devolve into. 

“Two years ago.”

“See? You're jealous because you have no one who loves you.”

A homeless man was sitting across from us and winked at me. I wanted to believe that the two moments were unrelated. It would figure. Hobo sex wouldn't have been much of a step down for me, considering the joke I was living in.

“Thanks a lot, Dr. Drew,” I said, “I thought you were a journalist student, not a relationship counselor.”

“I do have a level of common sense, unlike some people.”

The Church of the Holy Apostles was a big brick church with a stained glass window in the apse, behind the altar. I could not have fit in less, as I knew next to nothing about Christianity, other than what I'd seen on television or _The Exorcist_. A priest approached us; he was extremely smiley and looked like the kind of priest who played the guitar, singing folk songs about Jesus, not the kind who had to be called upon to exorcize demons from nine year old girls. I imagined that he probably didn't have a particularly good voice, but I supposed that kind of thing didn't matter if you were a priest. You kind of already had a career lined up.

“Is there anything I can help you with gentlemen? I'm Father Ricky,” he offered his hand to us.

I took out my wallet and found the picture that I took from the old lady photo album that had been in Steven Gerrard's car's glove box; it was the one that had been taken in Fenway Park with his two friends/acquaintances. It was creased from being in my wallet, but Steven Gerrard's face was still visible.

“Have you seen the guy in the middle?” I asked, handing the photo to Father Ricky.

“May I ask what this is about?” he asked, looking at us over the picture.

“He's my girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. He took something from her and we're trying to get it back.”

“I've seen all three of these men here. They usually sit in the back and talk to each other. I like to think they talk about the teachings,” Father Ricky said, handing the picture back, “The two you aren't looking for. They were here last week. They sat in their usual spot.”

Father Ricky pointed us to the back corner where Steven Gerrard and his friends hung around. Raphaël and I stood in front of the pew, looking down at it. Raphaël pulled the Bibles, prayer books and hymn books out of the slot in the pew ahead.

I kneeled down in front of the pew bench and reached underneath, feeling for anything. My fingers hit something metallic, cool and covered in tape. I pulled it off of the underside of the bench.

It was a silver lighter that had a knob along the side that slide down, revealing a USB connector. Raphaël took it and flipped open the top. The lighter part worked, too.

“This is major James Bond stuff,” Raphaël whispered. Somewhere else in the Church, Father Ricky was greeting some more people; their voices echoed. Raphaël and I went to leave, but Father Ricky insisted on giving us black badges that had a cross and “Church of the Holy Apostles” written underneath the cross in small gray letters. They were like the badges that you got from museums to prove that you paid the recommended donation for admission.

As we left the Church, Raphaël was talking about how he knew some Croatian refugee who used to crack codes or something. I wasn't really paying attention, since I was trying to determine the appropriate distance from the church was acceptable to throw out the little badge. Certainly, not while you were still within visible distance of it?

“Is it okay if I look at this?” he asked.

“Sure. It's not like my computer would be compatible.”

As we crossed the street, Raphaël pointed out that part of Ninth Avenue was closed off with crime scene tape. There was a crowd, as usual, so I didn't feel too bad trying to look in. Maybe, by some freak coincidence, Steven Gerrard had been locked in the trunk of a car for a month with adequate food, water, and waste disposal.

The crime scene photographers and the police officers were crowded around the trunk of a green sedan and when Radamel Falcao and Arda Turan arrived, it was pretty clear that whatever was in the trunk of the car was fairly dead. They were homicide detectives and according to Ronaldo, Falcao was supposed to be investigating the dead or missing private detectives.

When they saw me, Turan elbowed Falcao, whispering something. Falcao laughed, “If Benzema was killing the other private detectives in this city, he'd have to kill all of them before cases start falling his way.”

Turan said, “He'd probably hire the victim to kill himself.”

Well, it was reassuring to know that everyone assumed me to be too incompetent to be a murderer, which hopefully meant I was exempt from getting potentially murdered by a serial killer who was going after private detectives, i.e. why bother killing someone who would likely never be able to figure out your identity anyway?

Unless, the others were complete dunces, as well. Unfortunately, I hadn't met many other private detectives, since the one time Gonzalo and I went to some weird detective conference, where we found out that everyone else was a depressed alcoholic, who had been kicked out of the police force for having sex with witnesses, beating up teenagers, or in one case, shooting a guy. Gonzalo and I looked like soft infants, comparatively, considering that neither of us had a real career before entering a business partnership without any detective experience, other than an enjoyment of _Law and Order_ and the firm belief that we too could be like Sherlock Holmes. The fact that we even had a small business license was more because of my major, rather than a testament to our skills.

Perhaps, the murderer was asking detectives to solve an unsolvable case in order to lure them into a trap, which he or she will strike, then leave the detectives' bodies in the trunks of cars. Well, I hoped that Xabi Alonso wasn't a psychopath who was going to do that, since I needed his money to pay my half of the rent. If any leads went to any “dock” at four in the morning, while fog was rolling in off of the harbor, I would know that would be the appropriate time to approach my parents for some money for rent and quit the case, or leave the city, if he was a particularly persistent murderer.

“Everyone thinks you're a moron, huh?” Raphaël asked.

I shrugged and we started walking again. Most people treated me like I drank lead paint as a hobby. I guess, I didn't really help my case with my numerous mistakes, both life-wise and career-wise. Maybe I was biased, but I liked to think I wasn't as stupid as everyone assumed I was.


	6. Let Me Into Your Encryption

 I fell asleep on my desk in my little office. The night before, I got dinner at the Macaroni Hut next to my office and was writing up some paperwork, while I was drinking beer. Eventually, I had gotten drunk enough while filling out some reports to decide that a better use of my time would have been to sleep.

I woke up the next morning when my cell phone started ringing, echoing in my poor, aching skull. I reached around blindly for my cell phone, which was balanced on my chair, “Hello?”  
“Karim! You have to come out to Brooklyn,” Raphaël sounded excited, “The flash drive is encrypted, but my friend said that he could open it anyway.”

“It's like the crack of dawn,” I sat up, rubbing my eye with my free hand.

“It's ten o'clock in the morning.”

“I'll be there by noon,” I said, stretching out uncomfortably. I had a crick in my neck from sleeping on my desk, rather than in the comfort of my bed. I pulled on my sneakers, grabbed my sunglasses off of the filing cabinet, found a cigarette that had been rolled into the cuff of my jeans, and ventured out into the bright, terrible world. I had to go to a deli that was near my office, since I couldn't abide by having a form of macaroni for my hangover breakfast. I grabbed a bagel and a newspaper, choosing a table outside on the sidewalk.

 

> **SECOND PI FOUND DEAD THIS MONTH; POLICE SUSPECT COPYCAT MURDER**
> 
> NEW YORK—On the corner of Ninth and Twenty-Eighth, police found the body of another private investigator. David Villa, a former NYPD detective, had been found in the trunk of a stolen car, having been declared missing two weeks ago. The discovery of his body comes shortly after the news that fellow private investigator, Ruud van Nistelrooy, had been found under similar circumstances. Van Nistelrooy had been declared missing a month ago.
> 
> The NYPD are requesting for tips to be phone to –

The picture of Villa was of some sour-faced guy with a soul patch, evidently unaware that the early 2000s had passed him by very quickly.

I checked my pockets for a lighter, but apparently, I had left it at my apartment or in my office. I turned to the table next to mine, where two men were talking closely to one another over egg sandwiches. I tapped the guy closer to me, “Do you have a – oh!”

Sergio Ramos was the guy I tapped; Fernando Torres glared at me.

“Do I have a what?” he glanced back at Torres, whose look of loathing was fairly unmistakable, “Do you two know each other? I never get to meet Nando's friends!”

Ramos reached out to shake my hand, “Sergio. You are?”

“Karim,” I replied, even though I had no clue Ramos assumed that Torres and I were friends, considering how withering his glare was. Perhaps Torres always had a bitchface on when he saw his friends.

“What did you need again?”

“A lighter?” I showed him my unlit rescued cigarette, “I left mine at my apartment.”

“Sorry, bro. Don't smoke,” Ramos shrugged, “So what do you do for a living? I'm a chemical engineer.”

“Wow, that's cool.” Torres told me that Ramos was essentially a janitor; maybe Torres was a neuroscientist or something, so a chemical engineer's responsibilities would seem like that of a janitor to him. Other than getting paid, I really hadn't tried to pay all that much attention to Torres. I decided to lie, “I'm a stockbroker.”

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a stockbroker, since I had seen _Wall Street_ before I could actually understand most of it. My family didn't have a DVD player until I was in college, so all of the movies that we watched at home were usually movies that various family members bought in the early nineties from various garage sales all around Staten Island.

Torres nearly choked on his coffee, since he started laughing, but Ramos seemed somewhat interested, “No joke? You don't seem like a stockbroker.”

“You don't seem much like a chemical engineer,” I replied. I had seen him at the Jersey Shore, so I knew firsthand that Ramos appeared to be more suited to being a bathing suit model than an engineer. Not that I didn't understand where he was coming from, as I was, in fact, wearing the same clothes that I had worn the day before and three dollar sunglasses. I would imagine that most stockbrokers would not be hanging around at a cheap deli on a Wednesday at ten in the morning, too, but I could say the same of Ramos being a chemical engineer.

“Touché. Where'd you go to school?”

“Columbia.”

“You mean the country, right?” Torres asked, wiping a laughter tear from his eye. Everyone really did think I was too stupid to function.

“I still have my ID for student discounts,” I replied, digging it out of my wallet. My ID photo was an embarrassment, as when I was seventeen and entering college, I thought that I could have a goatee and still look reasonably fuckable. I was wrong about that, so Samir and Gonzalo always brought it up as _the_ goatee that they always made fun of.

I handed my ID to Torres, who said flatly, “You went to Columbia.”

“I went to Princeton. Ivy League for the win, huh?” Ramos held up his hand for a high-five. Torres handed my ID back. Ramos asked, “So what kind of stuff do you do as a stockbroker?”

I was in my element, discussing my fake job like I had been actually doing it for my entire life, instead of working in a dead-end job in close proximity to people who were convinced I chewed sticks for fun. If I had finished college, there was the distinct possibility that I'd have devolved into cocaine addiction, like everyone involved in finance, or least everyone according to movies set in the 1980s. At least in that fantasy, I'd have my own apartment, a hot girlfriend with expensive tastes, and more disposable income. I'd probably go mad with power and become an even bigger scumbag, but at least, I'd be a scumbag with money.

I caught the J train to Brooklyn to meet Raphaël. He lived in Williamsburg. Typical. When I got out of the Subway station, it was very clear that I did not belong there. I, Muslim rap fan, Karim Benzema, could not have had a lifestyle more different than the Hasidic Jews and hipsters if I tried. The whole neighborhood reeked of body odor, weed, and menthol cigarettes.

I generally hated people who didn't appreciate capitalism, so all of the communal herb gardens, food coops, and art collectives drove me crazy. From an young age, I was obsessed with making money; I earned my first dimes by blackmailing my older sisters about boys that they liked. I usually attributed my early robber-baron mindset to the fact that I was the third youngest child in a large immigrant family; I had to wear hand-me-downs until I was in college. For me, going to Williamsburg was like if a desperately unathletic Minecraft nerd was stranded at an Oakland Raiders tailgate. It was just not going to work out.

It seemed like every hipster in the neighborhood was sitting out on their front stoops, drinking suspicious clear liquids out of mason jars and wearing patchwork clothes, mostly Daisy Duke denim hotpants and useless scarves, considering the weather. It was humid and hot, which exasperated my hangover. I had to push past their sweaty, unwashed bodies to get into Raphaël's building. I was sweaty and unwashed because I was a human mess, while they were sweaty and unwashed on purpose. I usually intended to take showers, but my status as a deadbeat was becoming overwhelming, even for me.

“How much for your sneakers?” one of the dirty hipsters said. He had a short beard and was holding a moleskine journal, despite the complete inappropriateness of the venue. Who journals in ninety-five degree heat, amongst people who are ostensibly your friends?

I looked down at my sneakers. They were old Air Jordans; the white leather was turning gray with age. As much as my inner capitalist yearned for some extra pocket change, I couldn't agree to the transaction, since I didn't have any extra shoes on my person and the offering hipster was wearing ratty blue man-flats. His feet looked dirty and no amount of socks would have made me comfortable with putting those shoes on my feet.

I shook my head.

“If you change your mind, ask around for Pirata!” he shouted as I went into the apartment building.

Raphaël lived on the third floor of some crappy walk-up. The stairwell was boiling. And with every step upward, more hangover sweat and regular sweat eeked out of my pores. Raphaël let my into the apartment and promptly informed me, “You smell like a dumpster.”

“I need water.”

“Shh!” some blonde man was sitting at Raphaël's kitchen table, with a laptop in front of him. His two front teeth were very long and his narrow mouth gave him a very rodentine appearance.

Raphaël led me into his bedroom, which had a bunk bed and a desk squeezed into it, like a college dorm room, “That's Luka. He's from Croatia and he used to be a consultant for a military contracting group or something.”

“And he lives in Williamsburg?”

“Should military contracting consultants live in Yonkers? Or better yet, Staten Island?”

“Listen up, Connecticut, I'm not up for your bullshit today. I know that I'm a fuck up, you don't need to remind me,” I said, probably much more harshly than I actually felt, “How do you know this guy isn't going to fleece us?”

Raphaël looked a little taken aback, but he set his jaw, “Fleece us? Are you from the Roaring Twenties, now? What could this guy be hiding that would be interesting to a military contractor?”

“Whatever. Gerrard's put a lot of effort into hiding whatever is on this flash drive. How do you know that it won't be interesting?”

“It'll be interesting to us, but I doubt that it'll be interesting to anyone else. He's probably just some lunatic, who thinks that the government is out to get him,” Raphaël sat down on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed. It had a Real Madrid blanket, messed up along with his other sheets.

I sat down at the desk, “I don't think Xabi would be the type of person to be dating some guy who claims that the government puts flouride in the drinking water, if that's what you're getting at. He has multiple suits. And not shitty ones, really nice suits.”

“What do suits have to do with a conspiracy nut?”

“Well, I mean, Xabi's got his life in order. Why would you fuck that up to live some crazy guy who decides that the best way to hide something is to tape it to the underside of church benches?” I said, “The whole thing doesn't make sense unless Gerrard's hiding something kind of important.”

“It would make total sense if he was crazy and thought that the President was listening to his phone calls or something.”

There was a Chelsea poster on the wall opposite of the bunk bed. I asked, “Whose is that? You have a Madrid blanket.”

“My roommate, Oscar. He's the only one of us who likes them. The rest of us watch Real Madrid.”

“You don't watch real sports? Like basketball?”

“You're from France. You should like soccer. Like Paris-Saint Germain or something.”

I shrugged. Perhaps we had immigrated when I was too young. I was four years old and barely had any recollection of France, but I evidently hung around my family members enough to retain a little bit of an accent. I used to be much closer to them.

“As if I would like Paris Saint Germain, anyway. My family's from Lyon.”

“Olympique Lyonnais then.”

I shrugged again, “Are you roommates here for the summer?”

“Just Oscar. Álvaro and Nacho went home for the summer.”

“Varane!” the man from the kitchen shouted for Raphaël. I followed Raphaël back into the main room of the apartment. Raphaël's military contracting consultant was pacing around the table, like an agitated squirrel, “I'm not going any further with this.”

“What? Luka, why?”

Luka the Squirrel shoved the flash drive into my hand, saying, “Have fun playing James Bond because this is not something I want to see.”

“What is it?” I asked, looking at the flash drive dumbly, “Is it like really nasty porn?”

Luka the Squirrel glared at me, “This has Anfield International written all over it. I cannot be a part of this.”

Raphaël gasped, while I was unaware of what Anfield International was or what that even meant, “I don't get it. Am I supposed to get it?”

“They're one of the biggest military contracting groups in the country, dummy.”

“They're our competitors!” Luka the Squirrel said, “I've been at their competitors, WHL, before going to Bernabéu Industries. I don't want to deal with this. I'm only telling you this because you're a good guy, Raphaël.”

Luka the Squirrel grabbed his laptop and left. The flash drive felt very metaphorically heavy in my hands. I said, “Should we hand this in to someone? Like the FBI?”

“We stole it,” Raphaël said, “We can't give it to anyone because they'll find out we stole it and we'll get murdered.”

“What do we do with it?”

Raphaël sat at the table, burying his head into the palms of his hands, “We're going to get murdered.”

“No one is going to get murdered.”

“We'll be like the other detectives! They'll find our bodies in stolen cars!”

I sat across from Raphaël, “It's weird. The first detective went missing a month ago and Gerrard went missing a month ago.”

“You're not making me feel better,” Raphaël said, “In fact, that little tidbit is making more scared that I will end up in the trunk of a car with you. Dead.”

“I'll go put the flash drive back, if it makes you feel better.”

“What if they're watching the Church? Maybe we should just hide it.”

“Hide it where?”

“I don't know. Chuck it in the East River.”

“You can't throw it in the East River! Haven't you seen any spy movie? One of us will get kidnapped and the other is going to need to know where this thing is so the kidnapped one can get saved,” I said wisely. Frankly, if he wasn't going to prepare for the obvious, I was going to have to be the responsible one.

“I don't want it. If Luka's freaked out by it and he works in the industry, what the fuck are we going to do?” Raphaël started pacing around the table, “I knew I shouldn't have done this project. I shouldn't have worked with you! You had the worst reviews on Yelp!”

“Yelp rates private detectives?”

“Yeah, they do. And you came in last.”

I left Williamsburg without Raphaël, who was insistent on not participating any further in attempting to solve crimes. It was technically the first mystery that I was hired to solve, too, so it was a learning experience for both of us. Or least me, since I wasn't the one who decided to quit the case.

I wanted to go to my office to check my Yelp reviews. If I went back to Yonkers, I'd have to ask to borrow Samir or Gonzalo's computer, but they probably weren't back from work yet.

I took the Subway back to Manhattan to get back to the office and hide the flash drive, preferably in a place where I knew that no one would bother cleaning, looking at, or otherwise disturb. I also had to speak to Xabi about his lover possibly being involved in shady shit with military contractors. I also kind of wanted to come up with a scheme to get Raphaël back on board. Even despite him mocking me for everything about me, it was nice working with someone again. Raphaël wasn't Gonzalo, but Gonzalo and I weren't getting along all that well before he left anyway.


	7. Welcome to the Melting Pot

I was walking back to my office when a car pulled up in the fire zone of the hotel I was in front of.  It was a black Crown Victoria, desperately nondescript.  The passenger side window rolled down; I crouched down a little to look inside.  Ronaldo looked far more annoyed than usual, which was some sort of accomplishment, all things considered, "God help me.  Get in the car, Benzema."

"Why?"

"I need your help.  Get in the fucking car."

So I got into the car, "Is your personal car?  You seem more like a Lambo kind of guy."

"Every man is a Lambo kind of guy," Ronaldo snapped, "But it's hard to afford a Lamborghini while working as a public servant."

"I can't afford a car period and I'm technically a small business owner, so you're doing better than me."

"What an accomplishment on my part, huh?"

Ronaldo was very groomed, so I had always assumed he had expensive tastes, although he was a man who apparently visited the Jersey Shore instead of the Hamptons, playing polo with Billy Joel.  I guess being the best detective in New York was not as charmed as Ronaldo would have preferred.  I knew that feeling.  My tastes were far more expensive than the hobo lifestyle I was currently inhabiting, but then again, almost everything was more expensive than what I could afford.  He explained, "This is the department's car.  I'm borrowing it at the moment."

"What do you need me for?  Are we going to some dinner where you mock me for ten minutes in front of important people, like the Mayor or the President?"

"Oh Christ, that sounds like fun," Ronaldo said, checking blind spots and pulling out of the fire zone, "No.  As much as I wish that were the case, you unfortunately fit the bare minimum of the criteria I currently require."

"What's the criteria?"

"You're over four foot tall."

Ronaldo drove north on Eighth Avenue, sighing loudly at every light, as though he was greatly annoyed by my mere presence, even though he was the one who picked me up out of the blue.

"Did you know that there's a Yelp page for me?"

"You didn't?  It's the funniest fucking thing I've ever read.  Me, Falcao, Skunky, and Arda take turns reading it sometimes," Ronaldo started reciting some of the reviews for me, "One of them says that your laziness is astonishing.  Another one said that he suspected you were on ecstasy for both of your meetings.  Do you really go see clients when you're tweaking?  Anyway, apparently, you were grinding your teeth a lot.  One guy said that you must only get jobs because your last name comes early in the alphabet."

I slumped in the passenger's seat.  I already knew I was a failure.  I just had no clue that people discussed how much of a failure I was on a public forum.

"My favorite was in the title of a review that gave you two stars.  The person said that you were the best French detective."

"That's not so bad."

"But he put 'in New York,' in parentheses, so no one would get confused on how shit you are," Ronaldo cackled at the memory of reading that Yelp review.  He threw his head back and everything, laughing like he was a James Bond villain that drove a Crown Victoria and made forty thousand a year.

"Don't look like that," Ronaldo said, "You're making me feel bad."

Ronaldo rolled his eyes at the stop light.

I decided to change the subject, since my stupidity wasn't my favorite topic of conversation, "Where are we going anyway?"

"Leo's going to do stupid and I have to stop him."

"Why do you need me?"

"We might need to haul him bodily into this car."

Ronaldo parked the car in front of the far-flung Manhattan Island Bank ATM that had been used by some white guy in a blue shirt with the purpose of stealing money from Steven Gerrard's bank account.

"This is where you think Leo is?"

"Just listen for some hookers screaming and we'll find Leo," Ronaldo said, getting out of the car; he slammed the door.

"What does that even mean?"

We heard shouting drifting out from one of the sketchy alleyways; Ronaldo drew his gun and sprinted towards the shouting.  There was a reason why I wasn't a police officer.  Well, I supposed, there were multiple reasons I wasn't a police officer, actually.  Anyway, I followed, much slower without the aid of a firearm to make my presence useful or intimidating.  I was slightly crouched for reasons i didn't really understand myself.

There was a fight, with a gaggle of hookers surrounding the two fighters, like they were onlookers in a high school hallway.

"This is the police!" Ronaldo flashed his badge; the hookers scattered, past us into the street and further into the alleys.  The two fighters were still grappling with each other on the dirty alley ground, which looked to be covered in a healthy sheen of hobo piss.  Despite my current level of grime, I would have rather been murdered than ever subject myself to that kind of disgustingness.

"Grab him, Benzema!"

I was hesitant to pull them apart, since they were both on the ground.    I grabbed one of the men, while Ronaldo picked up Leo, who had a whopper of a gash on his forehead.  One of them, I don't know which, elbowed me in the mouth, but I still managed to keep a grip and puled him out of the fight.  I could taste blood on my tongue.  Leo was screaming, "You know about it!  You know what happened to David!"

The man I was holding was the little goat man hooker who stole my shirt.  He shouted back at Leo, but it was wordless intonations of extreme dissatisfaction.  His arms were flailing still.  He kicked at my knees.

Ronaldo dragged Leo away, leaving behind in the alleyway with the hooker.  I didn't know what to do, but I heard the car start and I saw the black Crown Victoria pass by the alley.

"I knew you were a cop," the hooker said, as I let him go.

"I'm really not a cop."

"How do you know Messi, then?  Coincidence?" he demanded, his eyes narrowing at me.  He was wearing my Hov shirt, but the bottom was tied up, so you could see the happy trail from his belly button, disappearing into his shorts.  

"We're kind of friends," I said, "What was he talking about?  Who's David?"

The hooker shrugged, "This guy that always comes to see me, Villa, used to be a cop or something and Messi thinks I know who killed him."

"Well, do you?"

"If I did, I would have squealed so fast, Usain Bolt would have looked slow," he pulled a cigarette package out of the waistband of his shorts, "I don't care if anyone thinks I'm a narc.  There's a reward for tips.  I kind of could use the cash, you know?"

That much was obvious.  He lit the cigarette with a blue Bic lighter that appeared to be almost out of lighter fluid, since he had to shake a few times, "I don't get why Messi cares.  Villa was kicked off the force for fucking me."

"Were you a witness in a different case?"

The hooker nodded, "Yup, David Silva, witness for the prosecution, at your service."

"Did Villa know van Nistelrooy?  You know, the other detective."

"I know who he is.  I'm not dumb.  Villa didn't talk about him until van Nistelrooy went missing," Silva said, "He thought that they were working on the same case, but that Villa got it after van Nistelrooy got clipped."

"What was the case?"

"I don't know.  Something about guys with blue tattoos on their hands," Silva said, leaning against the alley wall, checking his fingernails, "He sounded crazy the last time I saw him.  Just about this stupid tattoos.  I didn't get it."

I nodded, "Were the tattoos, were they Eyes of Horus?"

"What's that?"

"It's a thing from Egyptian mythology.  It's the eyes you see in Pyramids and stuff."

"I never saw the tattoos.  I just think Villa went nuts and pissed the wrong person off."

I started walking again.  I wanted to head back to Yonkers to go to sleep, but I wanted to see Xabi Alonso first.  I felt my mouth warily.  My bottom lip stung and my fingers were covered with blood, "Well fuck."

I ducked into a bar, got a napkin, and ordered a beer.  I slid into an empty booth to check my text messages.  A few more people entered the bar, even though it was the middle of the afternoon and the bar's theme was firmly in sketchy.  However, it was New York and a shitty neighborhood, so I shouldn't have underestimated the natures of the underbelly of New York City.  I had the usual daily texts from Samir and Gonzalo.  My parents were starting to learn how to text, so I usually had a dozen texts in jumbled French and phonetic Arabic.  My younger brothers were attempting to bring our parents into the twenty-first century, while my older siblings and I had given up on that lost cause.

Most of my childhood neighbors and friends had parents who were very interested in youth culture for whatever reason, while my parents had a rather tortured relationship with American culture, as was expected.  When I was very young, my father used to have an Algerian flag in front of our house, since most of the neighborhood had their Italian flags next to their American flags, but he took it down eventually.  This did lead to a cultural lockout for my parents, who believed the Backstreet Boys were an appropriate and timely reference, when referring to teen idols.  I guess, I should have just been pleased that they had moved on from the New Kids on the Block.

"Well you look familiar," a woman slid into the booth with me.  I looked up from my mother's requests to bring Gonzalo and Samir to Staten Island for dinner.  She didn't know that they were an item, nor did she probably even know they were gay.  All she did know was that they were my only friends.

It was the woman from Seaside Heights, so the only thing I could assume was that my luck was finally turning around.  I hadn't bathed in roughly forty-one hours; I learned that my case potentially was revolving around military contractors, who were not necessarily known for their moral strength; I learned that I was the worst detective in New York, according to Yelp; I had to help break up a fight; and my lip got busted open by a person who had previously been lying on a dirty alley floor.  I almost certainly had some type of infection.  But at the very least, a woman I barely knew found me memorable enough to recognize me in some dank, sketchy bar.  I considered the day a success as a result.

And I certainly knew the smoothest way to greet her.  I dribbled some of my beer down my dirty shirt, pulling the napkin away from my mouth, "What are you doing here?"

"Aren't you charming?"

"I mean, I didn't expect to see you here.  Or ever again."

She laughed, "You never told me your name."

"You never me yours either."

"I'm Hope.  And you are?" she held out her hand for me to shake.

I shook it, "I'm Karim.  Nice to meet you, Hope."

"Nice to meet you, Karim."

"So, do you live here?  In New York?"

"No, oh God, no.  I'm from Washington."

"DC?"

"No, the state."

"I don't know if I can associate with someone from the West Coast."

"Excuse me?"

"I mean, how do I know I can trust you if you don't like New York?"

"No offense, but you don't seem like you're from New York."

"Offense taken, indeed," I said, though it wasn't like anything I usually said.  Or at least, I didn't think I usually conversed like that.  I was losing control of my mouth, despite being less than one beer deep, but I was also talking to an attractive woman who seemed into me, even with her knowing my pay grade, roughly, so I was also a little giddy.

Two Jäger-rings and several beers later, I was terribly drunk.  The world felt slightly off beneath my feet, the entire bar seemed crooked.  I got up to leave, deciding that it was time to stumble to the train to Yonkers.  The Sun had just started to set, so it was somewhat acceptable to be a wreck.

Hope pulled me back, pushing me against the wall close to the door gently.  She rested her hands on my chest, leaning in close to whisper, "Those two men at the bar.  They got here before I did and they're just drinking water now."

I glanced up, but didn't really see their faces.  One guy was bald, or at least had hair that was the same color as the rest of the head, which seemed rather unlikely, while the other had darkish hair.

"They could just really hate their wives," I said, "And not want to go home."

"I don't think so," she pressed her lips to the sensitive spot next to my ear.

"Who do you think they are?"

"I think they're following you," she whispered, "Are you a spy?"

"Maybe.  Maybe we should talk in my office."

Soon, we were running in the cooler summer air, on the sidewalk.

I slept in my office again, not really making it back to my apartment.


	8. Kickin' Down the Cobblestones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I've been finishing up my graduate school stuff and I started an internship, so life's been a little crazy.

 I woke up on my desk and it turned out that Hope had left already. I felt a little like a formless, reheated microwave meal. I hadn't showered in three days and that fact was becoming increasingly clear. I felt somewhat crumpled, since I had fallen asleep on my desk for the second night in a row. Somehow, I hadn't gotten a hangover by some minor miracle, but I certainly didn't feel quite right. Just out of sorts. I got macaroni and cheese to take with me on the train back to Yonkers.

I was never a particularly neat person by any stretch of the imagination, much to the consternation of my mother and Samir. It was possible to mistake me for an organized person, since I didn't have any furniture in my bedroom other than my bed frame, which my parents insisted on buying for me for my birthday, since my mother almost had a stroke when she found out that I had my mattress directly on the floor. I preferred to think of my lifestyle as minimalist, but everyone else seemed to have unanimously agreed that I just was a bum with a place of residence.

If I were responsible for furnishing the apartment, there probably would have been no seating or tables. Everything would have been on the floor. My contribution to the apartment was just the television and the Playstation. You know, the tools that enable civilization.

When I got back to the apartment, it was very messy, a fairly big accomplishment, considering that I hadn't been in the apartment in three days. The couch that Samir and Gonzalo defiled had three big angry slashes in the faded fabric.

I assumed that it was one of their weird sex games and thusly destroyed the couch in a fit of gay sex madness. I shrugged it off and went to my bedroom to find my phone charger, since my phone died sometime in between the two Jager Rings and waking up alone in my office.

I couldn't help but feel something was off when I went into my bedroom. My bed and the floor was covered in clothes, which was usual, but the piles seemed different for whatever. I shrugged off my worries and looked through the piles to find my cell phone charger. While I was leaning into my stuff, my bedroom door was kicked open.

“Aaah!”

Gonzalo and I were both screaming at each other. I fell off of my bed and onto the floor.

Gonzalo was holding an aluminum Little Leaguer baseball bat, “Oh, it's just you.”

“Who did you think it was?”

“If you hadn't noticed the couch, we've been burgled,” he tossed the bat into my bed, landing with a soft fumph. He leaned against the doorframe; Gonzalo was only wearing boxers, which was very normal for him. In high school, Gonzalo invited me to his family's Christmas celebrations and even though his family members were all dressed nicely, since it was an important familial holiday gathering; Gonzalo was only wearing boxers, despite that fact. No one seemed to bat an eye at that. My own parents would have lost their minds.

“What? When did that happen?”

“Yesterday. We would have let you know, if you hadn't fallen off the face of the Earth.”

“Did they take anything valuable?”

“Yeah, that's the weird thing. You know how your television and your Playstation are the only things that you own that have any monetary worth? Everything else is questionable. They didn't take any of that stuff. They just ripped open the couch and Samir's pillows and the pancake mix and that kind of stuff,” Gonzalo scratched himself, completely unashamed, “The police think that whoever broke in thinks we're hiding something. You don't have any stash of cocaine or something, right?”

“Yeah, I can't make car payments, but I'm going to invest in cocaine?"

“To be fair to drug addicts, most of them can't make car payments either. Or at least, that's been my experience as a law enforcement officer. Where have you been anyway?”

“I had sex yesterday.”

“Congratulations for breaking that dry spell. You were starting to smell of desperation. Where were you, then? Your office?"

I nodded.

“Well, Samir and I were almost worried about you.”

“It's good to know that even though my apartment's been broken into, my two best friends in the World didn't scour the entire city looking for me. I could have been dead.”

“We were worried enough to call your parents.”

“You didn't.”

“Oh please,” Gonzalo sighed, “They're not that bad.”

For the most part, Gonzalo was right. My parents loved me: I never was hungry, we had a decent house in a decent neighborhood, they balanced my needs with the needs of my eight siblings, which had to be an intimidating struggle. There were points, though, on that Gonzalo just didn't get it. His parents were normal: they only had four kids, unlike my family's mammoth nine, and they requested Gonzalo wear clothes at Christmas dinners, but those requests went unheeded.

“I'm Schrödinger's son at the best of times with them. You know how my mother gets.”

“I would suggest you go down to Staten Island before you end up on a milk carton.”

I only got to shower before I went to Staten Island. I had hoped to take a nap and search for my borrowed copy of _Fight Club_ to make sure the burglars hadn't run off with something with monetary worth, but I decided to go home.

My mother greeted me how I expected her to. She hit me with a wooden spoon, shouting, “Karim! We thought you were dead!”

They always thought I was in some elusive state between life and death, so I was not particularly surprised that my mother had jumped to that particular conclusion. I said, “I texted you yesterday and you thought I was murdered already?”

“It's not like it takes a long time to get murdered,” she said, “You are very good at getting into trouble.”

I rubbed the spot where she hit me, “To be fair to me, Ma, I haven't gotten murdered yet and I've been alive for twenty-four years.”

My youngest brother, Sabri, had been going to summer school, so he was sitting at the kitchen table, allegedly doing homework, though I wouldn't have put it past him to simply want to sit in, in order to observe my humiliation.

“You used to be the one we wouldn't have to worry about,” my mother lamented, as usual, about my steep decline from Ivy League business student to a grown man who accepted money for playing Mahjong. She made that observation at least once a conversation, which mostly made conversations with her unbearable.

“We all know what happened to that, huh?”  
“Shut up, Sabri!”

“Don't speak to your brother that way,” my mother hit me with her wooden spoon again.

“He's going to get us all put on a watch list with his stupid job.”

“That's not funny!” she said, pacing around the kitchen, picking up an empty cup from the table, "I already have to worry about you doing a dangerous job. I don't want to get killed because you live in a bad neighborhood."

"I don't live in a bad neighborhood."

Pretty much everyone who lived in my building were commuters; they seemed like a respectable bunch. Samir and I were most definitely the ones who brought down the community standards.

“I worry about you the most,” she informed me, although I knew that from a number of previous conversations with her, “Do you want to go to Algeria? Your grandparents keep asking about you kids.”

Whenever any of us got into trouble, or expressed mild dissatisfaction with anything, our parents always suggested that an emergency trip to Algeria would solve all of our problems. I was threatened with enforced deportation by them several times and I only got stuck going once. Everyone else managed to avoid going, even my sister who ran away to marry a Jewish guy.

“I don't want to go to Algeria. Everything is fine. Nothing bad is going to happen to me,” I said. I, like any right-minded individual, declined to mention the whole problem with the military contractors. If my mother knew about that, she'd lose her mind. She'd probably call the CIA herself in a desperate attempt to protect me from myself. Lying to her did remind me that I needed to find Xabi Alonso. For some reason, he always reminded me of a reasonable father figure.

My mother studied me for a long minute, “What happened to your mouth?”

In my post-sex haze, I had almost forgotten that yesterday, all things considered, was actually quite busy. I ran into Fernando Torres and Sergio Ramos, found out that Steven Gerrard was involved in military contractor groups somehow, and helped Ronaldo stop a fight between two little people, which resulted in a busted lip. I also had sex, which was a thought bubbling to the surface every so often and found it somewhat difficult to not divulge that information to every person I spoke to.

“Did you get into a fight?”

“No. I tripped.”

I probably sounded like an abused spouse, even though I was just covering up the fact that I had to help break up a fight between a little hooker and a little police detective. My mother would only assume the worst of me, anyway. She squinted at me suspiciously, but didn't talk about that issue anymore. She insisted that I stay for dinner, which didn't take much convincing, especially since I hadn't eaten a real meal that didn't have a macaroni component in three days.

I played basketball in the street with Sabri before dinner was ready. My other younger brother, Gressy, wasn't home yet because he was bussing at some restaurant nearby.

“What're you working on now, Karim?”

“Missing person case.”

“That's a big step up for you, huh?” Sabri said. He missed his shot and it bounced off the backboard that had been attached to a telephone pole years ago from when I was a kid. He asked, “You sure there aren't any drug dealers involved in this one?”

I shrugged. I really wanted to tell him about the actualities of my case, but he was a snitch, like all younger brothers were, so I had to avoid actually proving him wrong, that I was not, in fact, a dunce unable to put clues together.

Some girls on rollerblades whizzed past, waving at Sabri. He turned pink as I rubbed his head, teasing him.

“Whatever, it's not like you're getting any,” Sabri said, pulling the basketball away from me.

“Au contraire, mon frére.”

“The day you get a girl into your gay sex den is the day that Mom stops thinking you're dead every three seconds,” Sabri shot again, missing again, “By the way, I saw Samir and Pipita are Facebook official. How long has Samir been waiting for that?”

The ball had taken a funny deflection off of the rim, almost hitting me in the face, “I think Samir's been waiting since Pipita helped me move into my dorm. But I'll take offense to your previous statement.”

Sabri shrugged, “I'll believe you when you bring her for family dinner.”  


“She's not Muslim.”

“So? Just don't marry her and Mom won't lose her mind.”

I didn't want to have to admit that I had only met Hope twice, both by accident. I had trouble impressing my younger siblings already, so I wouldn't make Sabri and Gressy's job of making fun of me easier.

When Gressy and our father got home from work, we all sat at the kitchen table. Even though the whole gang wasn't there, the dinner went along as usual: everyone started bickering at each other. It was probably very good that my family wasn't passive-agressive, but just very open with our opinions and disagreements. I'm sure in most other families in America, I would have been strangled by a very disappointed parent.

The Benzemas always had a good argument. This was especially true during Thanksgiving; certainly, the Pilgrims envisioned their celebration of a harvest devolving into a bunch of angry Muslims, and one Jewish man, yelling at each other in French about various topical issues of the day.

That day, I was off of the hot seat for once, since it was Sabri who was in summer school. My father was advocating for Sabri to go for a trip to Algeria, “Your grandparents haven't seen you, Sabri, since you were a little boy. You're having such trouble here; it would be nice to go there.”

“Well, tell them to move to a house with wireless, maybe I'll think about going.”

My mother hit him on the shoulder, muttering something about spoiled American teenagers.

“Karim, tell your brother how nice Algeria is.”

I could be on the other side of the Solar System and my parents would call me up, during one of their idle threats to another sibling to inquire about how nice Algeria was. As I was the only one who had gotten sucked into a trip to Algeria, I was the only one in twenty-some years to actually see our grandparents' home.

“It's really nice. They live in a city. It's just like France, except everyone speaks Arabic.”

“I've never been to France,” Sabri snapped; he had been the only Benzema born in America, “I didn't even mess that bad.”

“Karim wasn't punished with going to Algeria.”

“So him getting kicked out college and going to Algeria in the same week was a coincidence?”

“At least I got kicked out of an Ivy League. You're going to get kicked out of a SUNY.”

“Please, Karim! That's not helping!”

Gressy was cackling throughout the entire discussion.

Thankfully, the doorbell rang. It was probably the neighbors in our duplex; growing up, there was a similarly loud Italian family who were always yelling at each other in Italian. The only differences between our families were the sing-song natures of our languages. Whenever the daily dinner table conversations got too raucaus, they just pounded on the wall that separated our too small dining rooms. The new neighbors were similarly Italian, but did not appreciate the daily tortured conversation about our various failings.

Even though I partialy instigated the problem, I sprang up from my chair to go answer the door. When I was growing up, running to answer the door was always a competition. There were nine of us racing for the door; whoever knocked always must have been shocked, seeing nine kids squeezing in the doorway, gazing back at them.

Instead, Raphaël was standing on my parents' shared front patio in a sea of similar two-family houses, “I tried to call you. Your roommate said you were on Staten Island.”

“Is their something wrong?”

“Who's there, Karim?” my father shouted from the dining room. It was all very usual for my family.

“It's just a friend!”

“Bring her in for dinner! We speak English!” my mother shouted.

“What do you want? Make it quick. You don't want to meet them.”  
“No, it's okay. I didn't have dinner yet,” Raphaël said, pushing his way past me, into my parents' den of insanity.

“Why?”

Raphaël ignored me and went straight to the dining room as though he knew the layout already. By the time, I got into the dining room, my mother was already piling his plate high with couscous and vegetables.

“So what's your name?” my mother asked, “Are you one of Gonzalo's friends?”

“I'm Raphaël. I'm helping Karim with his case,” he sat down next to Gressy.

“You didn't say you had a new case,” my father said, “Are you going to get paid real money? I have a friend who needs a bookkeeper. He said he'll pay you real money.”

My father must have had three dozen “friends” who were in need of unlicensed bookkeepers. I don't know where he met these friends, since most of his free time was spent watching Al-Jezeera and the Fox Soccer Channel, in a perpetual futile rage at soccer results, while my mother vacuumed around him. Because I never had to comfort of turning down a quick buck, I would usually set up their Quicken on ancient Windows-based PCs that must have fallen off the back of a truck in 1998, mostly in dank basement apartments that always smelled like hummus that had gone off.

“Just photographing some more losers,” I said. To tell my mother the truth about most of my life would have been a mistake. My siblings got away with doing more exciting things, but my mother always had a leash on me. One of my older brothers was a firefighter in Jersey and for the most part, my mother didn't fret over his potential death, like she did over mine. I used to cry a lot as a child; it was on my report card.

Raphaël gave a weird look, but didn't say anything to contradict me, “Yeah, I'm helping him for a project, since I'm a journalism student.”

“Oh. Do you go to Columbia?” my mother asked.

“No, I go to NYU. Why?”

“I thought you might have met at Columbia.”

“He's nineteen, Ma. I was out of Columbia before he started college.”

“How am I supposed to know that?”

“Wait a second. You went to Columbia? Like the one in Morningside Heights? Not like some fake one in Ohio or something?”

“What? I'm not smart enough to go to Columbia?”

“Cool your jets, Karim. You only went for three and a half years,” Gressy said.

“That's three and a half yaers longer than you have.”

“Boys!”

Dinner in the Benzema household never changed. After the dinner calamity, I led Raphaël to the backyard. We sat in the grass, near the back fence, so my mother wouldn't be able to eavesdrop easily.

“You didn't tell me you went to Columbia.”

“Jealous I went to your reach school?” I said, leaning against the fence, “Why did you come here anyway? I wouldn't come here if I wasn't biologically related to these lunatics.”

Raphaël shrugged, “I think I want to keep helping out. I kind of want to figure out how this ends.”

Raphaël moved a little closer to me, but I didn't say anything about that. My neighborhood seemed very normal at that moment. People were in their yards or balconies. They were barbequing or drinking beers, sometimes both. Kids were in the streets, playing basketball; some were playing soccer with overturned trash cans as their goals. But Raphaël and I sat in my utterly unremarkable backyard, like all the others, deciding that, yes, it would be a good idea to continue investigating a man whose disappearance had something to do with military contractors. Even at the time, I assumed we were idiots.


	9. All We Wanna Know is "Where the Party At?"

The day ended with Samir and me walking from the elevator to our apartment, slamming our bedroom doors without words to one another.  It hadn't been a good night, to say the least.  It was probably the worst in a while, and that was saying a lot, for me.  To be completely honest, Samir and I weren't as angry at each other as we were with other people, though Samir was probably, a little bit, mad at me.  And I couldn't say that he didn't deserve that.

The day started off well enough.  I met Raphaël to go find Xabi Alonso, a situation that I had been passively avoiding for at least four days.  The fact that I had been drunken mess, as well as my family's determined belief that I had probably been murdered, was why it had taken so long to get around to that activity.

As we walked along Sixth Avenue, Raphaël asked, "My friend's band is having a gig tomorrow.  Do you want to come with me?"

I shrugged, "What kind of band is it?"

They're trying to fuse country music with nineties hip hop."

"Pass.  That sounds fucking awful."

"Come on.  Do you know how to have fun?"

"I do.  But I do have a shred of integrity.  I don't have much dignity, so it's all I have," I replied.  I didn't even want to imagine what Raphaël's friend's band sounds like, "What do they do?  Mash up 2 Live Crew with…I don't even know any country musicians."

Raphaël snorted, "Taylor Swift?  She still counts, right?"

"Fine.  2 Live Crew with Taylor Swift?  Is that something that should exist?"

Raphaël punched at my shoulder, "Come on.  It'll be fun.  They said that lead singer of Passion Pit's cousin is going to be there."

"What a draw.  Why didn't you say that earlier!"

"You can make fun of it."

"As appealing as that sounds…"

"You are probably the most boring person on the planet if you don't come.  You don't know how to have any fun."

"Is that a requirement now?  To know how to have fun?"

"It's a requirement to be my friend."

"Will I be uncomfortably old for your group of friends?"

"No.  It wouldn't matter anyway."

"Why wouldn't it matter?"

"Because you'll be there with me.  I'm young enough for both of us."

"Fine.  Fine.  I'll go.  Do I have to dress like one of your kind, though?"

"My kind?"

"Hipsters.  Pitchfork readers.  The scarved.  The unwashed by choice."

"Ha ha.  You're so funny, Karim," Raphaël said sarcastically, but he smiled anyway, like a schoolgirl in love with her social studies teacher.

Raphaël and I cornered Xabi in the vestibule of some fancy-looking Spanish restaurant.  It had white table clothes and a menu printed with cursive in one of those expensive glass cases outside of the front door.  Sour-faced people in expensive suits pushed past us, while Xabi's face turned roughly the same color as his beard, in conjunction with his anger level.

"You're out of your fucking minds," he growled, "You have no clue what you're talking about."

We had tried to explain that we had fairly decent evidence to suspect that Steven Gerrard was involved with military contractors, but that didn't go over too well with Xabi.

"Come on, Mr. Alonso," Raphaël tried to reason, "We're all intelligent men.  We have good reason to believe--"

"Listen up, Stretch, I'll believe this bald moron before I start fielding accusations from an Ivy League wannabe," Xabi jabbed his thumb at me; his eyes were kind of bugging out, he was so angry.  He probably didn't know that I was an Ivy League dropout; Xabi'd have a stroke if he found that out.  He continued, "Once your name is on the business card, maybe I'll start considering your opinions."

I rubbed my head reflexively.  I was perfectly able to grow hair; it was just that my hair grew in weirdly.   I was perfectly fine with insults to my intelligence, but I was vain enough to always contemplate my hairline.  I did grow it out every once in a while to make sure my follicles were working at normal operating capacity.  I assumed that Xabi was going into shark mode.  Samir had a similar emotional switch in college when he was going from normal friend to Debate Club vice president.

"Karim agrees with me," Raphaël protested.

I shrugged, "It's kind of one of those things."

Xabi got into my physical space bubble.  I wasn't sure if Xabi was going to hit me.  I silently prayed for him to hit Raphaël instead of me.  He looked like either he couldn't get angrier or couldn't believe how incredibly stupid we were.  I backed up away form him, up against the wall.  The fire alarm poked uncomfortably into the small of my back.

"You just don't know him," Xabi said, "If you knew him, you'd know how wrong you are."

"If we knew him, we wouldn't have to be in this situation altogether," I said.  And I regretted saying that almost immediately.

He grabbed me by shoulders, pushing me against the fire alarm even more uncomfortably, "Listen to me, Melonhead.  I work for Anoeta.  If Steven was a mercenary or whatever you're saying, I would know.  Trust me."

He let go of my shoulders and looked through the contacts of his phone, "Call his friends.  Jamie and Pepe.  They work with him.  They even knew him when Steven lived in Boston."

Xabi sent the contacts to Raphaël's iPhone before storming off into the restaurant.  Before he left, Xabi snarled, "Do not call me until you find Steven, Melonhead."

"My head isn't really that big, is it?" I asked as we walked.  I rubbed my back, where the fire alarm probably made a dent in my spinal column.

"It's not normal-sized," Raphaël replied.  He scrolled through the contact list that Xabi sent him, "Do you think that Jamie could be that J.C. person from the note that we found?"

"If Jamie's a dude and not a woman.  That chicken scratch was not the handwriting of any self-respecting woman," I said, "Have you ever heard of Anoeta?  You know, in your journalism studies?"

"Law firms aren't really ripe for public outrage and scandal."

We looked it up on the Internet on the tiny screen of Raphaël's iPhone, while we were in the park.  It was too hot to pull a Sorkin and walk while discussing important topics.  Ideally, all of my conversations would be conducted in air conditioning, but my office didn't have air conditioning and considering the Macaroni Hut's stoves sharing the wall with my office, it was probably 150 degrees in there.  Samir and I hadn't turned on the air conditioning, since neither of us had the money for a significantly higher electric bill.  I was eagerly awaiting the day that Gonzalo moved in, in writing, so that he could start putting in some money for rent, especially since he ate all of my Honey Nut Cheerios, since he didn't like Samir's regular, bland, sawdust Cheerios.

"Looks like they deal with international criminal law," Raphaël read off of his iPhone.  We were laying on the bare grass, so little shards of acorns and broken twigs were poking into my legs, sticking to my shirt.

"You'd think Xabi'd want to live in the Hague, then, huh?” I said.  Raphaël handed me the cell phone and I made a note of their phone number.

“You know that the International Criminal Court is house in the Hague?  I'm proud of you,” Raphaël flicked my nose.  I didn't know how to respond to that, so I refused to acknowledge it.  Living in denial regarding minor problems was a lifestyle choice that I had dedicated myself to fully.

“What are the other important contracting groups?” I asked.

“There are loads.  Luka used to work for WHL.  Now he works for Bernabéu Industries, which is some weapons developer, I think.  There's Loftus, Maracanã, Azteca.  Westends is a German one.  San Siro's in Italy.”

“Are there any French ones?”

“Gerland, I think.”

I scrolled through the information about Anoeta a little bit more.

“So do you think Xabi's covering up for Steven?  Or what?” Raphaël asked, touching my hand gently, even though I was still reading the stuff on his iPhone about Anoeta.  I just ignored it.  It was awkwardly tender, like a toddler holding a chicken egg.

“I don't think so.”

If I had to guess, I would have assumed that Xabi loved Steven Gerrard, but really that had nothing to do with whether or not he was covering up for Steven Gerrard.  If I had learned anything in my line of work, people in love did weird things, like pay a stranger to follow their loved ones to see if they were cheating.

I was about to call Jamie, from Xabi's contacts, when I got a call, "Karim!  What are you doing tonight?”

“Ángel?”

“Yeah.  I'm having a party at my apartment.  Tell Samir to come.”

“Is Pipita allowed to come, too?”

“Whatever,” Ángel grunted.  He hung up on me.  I guess, it served Gonzalo right, considering that he fucked his way through my college roommates.

Raphaël looked at me, confused.  I asked, “Do you want to come with me to a party tonight?"

After I finally called Jamie, Raphaël and I agreed to meet later at Ángel's apartment in the Bronx, since his roommate needed help with something.  His roommate, Oscar, was apparently from Brazil, so he wasn't really aware, entirely, of American customs regarding our Visa system.  I met Gonzalo and Samir in front of Ángel's building, before climbing eight flights of stairs in order to get into Ángel's party.  Ángel opened the door, hugging me and Samir, but glared at Gonzalo.

“Oh Karim, we're playing a game.  Straight guys have to wear blindfolds.”

“What's going to happen?  Are you going to draw on my head?”

“No.  It's to protect everyone from your judgemental heterosexual male eyes,” Ángel said, handing me a flowered tie.

“There has to be an easier solution than this?”

Samir shrugged at me.  Gonzalo had deserted us already, disappearing into the throng of bodies.  I took the tie.

I tried to find a good spot, but had to either grab onto Samir's shoulder or lead myself around the apartment by feeling the wall, which was very difficult because of people who were leaning against the walls, who probably didn't enjoy my unintentional fondling of their upper bodies.  Samir pushed me to lean against an empty corner in the room, handing me a cup.

“Gonzalo told me that he wants to cool off,” Samir whispered, like he was talking about some lunatic conspiracy theory.

“Well, fuck man.  I'm sorry,” I said, steeling myself for the barrage of comments about Gonzalo's potentially misshapened junk.

“That stupid fucker.  He thinks that I don't know that he's the one who created that Facebook page for his ass,” Samir hissed, "Or that his Grindr profile picture is a picture of his ass.  He's such a fucking asshole."

"Hmm…" I replied.  Ángel's stupid blindfold plan was really cramping my conversational skills.  It was really hard to determine what the appropriate way to steer that conversation, since I couldn't see whether Gonzalo was within earshot, or whether anyone else who I knew from college was there.

"That's all you have to say?"

“I'm sure that it's just a phase,” I said, taking a sip from my cup.  It was something very sweet with a nasty undertaste, probably from some plastic bottled, bottom shelf vodka.

“It's a phase called his life,” Samir snapped, “I've liked him for six years and we're six months into a relationship--”  
“Six months?  You've been fucking for six months and I only found out two weeks ago?”

“Sorry that our lives don't revolve around your emotional obliviousness,” Samir said, sounding like he was glaring at me, “I was saying that he's a--”

“Is that Benzema?” another voice called out from across the room, “Where's that fucking Lollypop Head?”

The first week in college established a lot of the issues that would follow me for the next four years.  One of those issues was that my roommates (and Gonzalo) discovered that my head was roughly the same shape as a lollypop, except for my nose, so everyone decided to call me “Lollypop.”  It was probably the worst nickname on the planet.

“Oh fuck, Franck's coming over here,” Samir muttered.  A hand felt my face, rather roughly, with the palm squashing my nose.  It made sense, since Franck Ribery would be forced to wear a blindfold, as well.

“I can tell that fucking nose from anywhere!” Franck Ribery and I had been in the business program together.  We had even done our internship together; well, I had done the first half of my internship with him.  He was one of the oldest of the business students in our year, so he always took informal leadership of our study groups.

“Are you still doing that fucking detective shit?” Franck asked, his hand still firmly flat on my face.  I decided that I hated Franck Ribery and Ángel, though for different reasons.  He wandered away after a stilted conversation tapered off painfully.

“Why was Ribery over here?” Gonzalo's voice asked.

“He loves harassing Karim,” Samir replied, “Where were you?”  
“Talking to some people.”

“Who?  You didn't go to Columbia.”  
“Are most of the people here from Columbia?” I asked, but they ignored me.

“Just some people.  Jesus, calm yourself.”

I innately understood that an argument was brewing, so I felt my way out of the corner, settling in a doorway.  I wondered if I could just choose Gonzalo or Samir.  Maybe they'd decide for me, like I was a child in a custody agreement.  I knew Gonzalo longer, but I did live with Samir.  My parents would be so disappointed if I had to end my friendship with one of them.

A familiar voice interrupted my admittedly stupid thoughts, “Fancy seeing you here, huh?”  
“You finally got here?”

“What's with the blindfolds?” Raphaël asked.  A finger, I assumed his, tapped on the tie's fabric that was above my ear.  A hand, I didn't want to assume whose, was on my hip, fingertips pressing against my t-shirt.

“It's Ángel's idea of a fun party game.”

“You know, I was thinking, on the train here,” Raphaël said, “What if Steven Gerrard was lying to Xabi about being in love with him?  You know?  Like one of the lady spies in a _James Bond_ movie?”

“I'd feel really bad for Xabi, if that's true."

The hand on my hip, twisted my t-shirt around its fingers.  A little piece of flesh, above the belt loops on my short, felt very exposed, so everyone could see, though no one else probably noticed.

"You're standing in the bathroom doorway," Raphaël said, "You're in everyone's way."

"Lead me elsewhere," I replied, reaching out for Raphaël's shoulder.  The hand removed itself from being tangled in my t-shirt and Raphaël grabbed my hand, pulling me away from the bathroom.  I downed my drink as we traversed the crowded room.

"Do you want another drink?"

I handed Raphaël my cup by holding it out blindly, hitting my hand against his body, "Thanks, bro."

I could hear Gonzalo and Samir arguing some place in the apartment.  Gonzalo shouted, "Why are you so focused on my ass?  Let it go!"

Even though at one point I had been mildly repulsed by their relationship, what with their fives after making out on the couch they defiled or Samir willingly sleeping in the same bed as a grown man who ate cereal like an animal, I had become used to their awful union over the previous two weeks.  I was best friends with both of them, so there was no awkward meetings of one night stands over Cheerios.  No one had stolen our oven timer and all of the spoons, though that a result of my own night stand, rather than Samir's.

A soft hand stroked my elbow, "It's good to see you here, huh?"

"How do you keep finding me?"

"Do you not want me to find you?  I'm offended."

"No, I'm perfectly good with finding me.  It's a big city and I'd never find you."

"Aren't you a detective?  Isn't it your job to find people?"

"According to reviews, I'm not particularly good at my job."

Hope's hand rubbed against my beard stubble, "Was it a rough day?  Is that why you're in a mood?  Tell me about the tough day at the office, Lady Justice."

"My boss isn't really understanding."

"Yeah?  Why?  Did you fuck something up?"

"Kind of."

"Poor Karim.  So what's with the blindfold, anyway?"

"It's so I don't judge you with my cruel heterosexual eyes," I pulled the blindfold up a little bit.  Hope laughed, tugging it back down over my eyes.

"I don't want you to judge me," she said, "You youngsters have strange customs."

"Youngsters?  This is just a normal party for freewheeling New Yorkers.  Just wait until Ángel breaks out the ecstasy so we can finally begin the orgy.  Then, I'll really de-stress from work."

Hope tugged on my hands, leading me to yet another part of the apartment.  I wondered vaguely where Raphaël was, with my drink.  I supposed it didn't really matter.  She lad me into another room; I could sense the doorway and I heard the door shut behind us.

I tried to feel around for the bed, to sit down.  I sat; my ass slide off of the bed, since I evidently sat down too close to the edge of the bed.  I hit the floor with a loud thump.  Hope laughed and kissed me, even though I was sitting on the floor of either Ángel or Ángel's roommate's bedroom with a useless blindfold on.  I reached out clumsily to put my hand along her jaw as we continued kissing.

The door opened.

“Oh!”

The door slammed shut again.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Some kid,” Hope said, “Probably looking for someone.”

She leaned in closer.  The door opened again.

“Did you pay this one, too, Lollypop?” Franck Ribery asked.  I tugged off my blindfold.  He was standing in the doorway with just about everyone else at the party.  It was like being stuck in my worst fear in high school again, but being surrounded by people I disliked during college.  It was the worst of both worlds.  There was nothing I could say that would make any of it better.  I started sweating profusely, got up, pushed past the crowd and walked out of the apartment.

Samir was sitting in the stairwell, looking at his cellphone screen intently.  He looked up, “Are you ready to go?”

“Well, you know, once Franck decided to remind everyone that I've been arrested, I figured I might as well leave on a high note.”  
We got a cab.

“Pipita has to go to his parents' apartment, tonight,” Samir said, looking out of the window, like he was in some torrid drama.

“He's a big boy.  He'll be fine,” I replied.  I thought about just stealing Samir's license in the morning, but I decided to ask, even though it was completely the wrong time, “I know this isn't a good time, but can I borrow your license tomorrow?”

“Why?”

"Because I have a meeting at some crazy contracting office and I told them my name is Samir Nasri.  It's for a case.  I won't sully your name around this city."

“You're a lot taller than me and we don't even look alike.”

“I was just banking on them assuming that all Arabs look alike.”

“But _we_ don't look alike.  What kind of contracting is it?  Is it a job?”

“Anfield International."

"You gave my name to a military contracting office?  Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"They wouldn't talk to me if I didn't have my degree.  I tried twice.  Does everyone know about them or something?"

"They've been in the news for, like, ten years, stupid.  What did you tell them?"

I shrugged, “I told them I graduated Cum Laude from Columbia; they really ate that up.”

“Did you tell them that I'm a law student at Columbia?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I don't want them to know that I'm a law student at Columbia!  I prefer to keep my private life out of Anfield International's files."

"You're a law student?"

“Jesus Christ!  No one listens to me, do they?” Samir pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pointedly ignored me for the rest of the trip.  It turned out that the only my only compatriot in underachievement hadn't actually been underachieving for the past two years.  He was actually doing something with his life.  And I was a twenty-four year old loser, who didn't even have his bachelor's degree.  Well fuck.

There was also the fact that somehow I had managed to avoid knowing that one of my two best friends was actually achieving something.  I was officially the worst.

And when we got back to the apartment, we both slammed our bedroom doors.


	10. New York, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My beloved Real Madrid is certainly changing. I miss Pipita already.
> 
> I hope to be done with this fic by the end of the summer.

 "As you can see, I already have a small business loan, so I think I would be a great candidate for a student loan."

"Let me get this straight. You need a student loan for one semester? Where you plan on only taking four classes," the loan officer asked, looking over the top of her glasses somewhat suspiciously. Like if they gave me the loan, I would flee the country with theoretical money. "And you already have a different loan from this bank?"

"I'm maxed on that one, to be completely honest."

"So you want to borrow more money, on a student loan? For one of the most expensive schools in the country?"

"It's a completely different interest rate and, to be totally honest, I maxed out my business loans."

"What do you plan on studying? For one semester," she glanced at her computer, then back at me.

"I'm going to be finishing my B.B.A.. I plan on working at an accounting firm after I graduate."

"Why are you coming for a loan? Seven semesters into a degree?" she asked. That was precisely the question I was hoping to avoid. Never mind the fact that I hadn't attended a class in three years.

"I had a full ride to Columbia for the first three and a half years, but I got arrested for hiring a prostitute at a company party, when I was an intern. And then, I went to Algeria for six months," I replied, neglecting to mention the drug charge attached to that arrest, figuring that the whole prostitute thing was enough to determine, that while I did mess up, I was not irredeemable. I also didn't mention that I was currently bumming around New York, allegedly investigating things, like a third-rate Hardy Boy.

"Algeria?"

"My grandparents live there. It was quasi-punishment."

"What makes you want to return to school right now? At this moment?"

"Because I don't want to be a failure anymore," I said, covering my mouth, surprised that I even admitted that. I'd hesitate to even tell my family or my friends that. But I told a woman who held my future in her hands.

The loan officer's eyebrows almost disappeared behind her bangs. She shook my hand before I left. I could tell that she thought I was mildly insane. Hopefully that meant that she approved me for the loan, anyway.

I was going to meet Raphaël for lunch, even though I had lost track of him the night before. Evidently, he was still alive and had made the journey back from the Bronx to Brooklyn and we met in Manhattan. Raphaël was quiet while we waited on line to order. He didn't even complain about the guy in front of us who was wearing a Coldplay concert t-shirt, so I was fairly certain something was wrong with him.

“What's with the suit?” he asked, not really looking at me.

“I had a meeting.”

“Oh yeah? With the Anfield guys, right?”

“I had to ditch that. My roommate said he would murder me if I tried to use his name to interview military contractors,” I replied, grabbing a Snapple from a fridge near the counter.

“I never got to ask you, how did that party ended up for you?” Raphaël asked, like he expected some huge confession from me. Well, he wasn't getting one.

“Just ran into some girl I've been talking to, nothing big,” I replied. That was technically true, but lacking in certain details, like when Franck Ribery implied I was often in the habit of hiring prostitutes.

“So you admit that, huh?”

“Yeah. I didn't pay her,” I replied.

“I didn't say that you paid her.”

“I was just letting you know that I didn't,” I said, though it was starting to feel like we were speaking around each other, rather than having an actual conversation, “What are you getting at?”

“I asked you out on a date and then I found you hooking up with some random woman,” Raphaël snapped.

“You did?” I asked, trying desperately to remember any situation that I agreed to that could have been possibly construed as a date. Oh fuck. That awful sounding gig that he invited me to. Well, fuck.

“Are you oblivious or just stupid?”  
“Different people have different answers to that question.”

“You're a fucking moron,” Raphaël said, storming out of the deli. I certainly was very good at getting everyone to hate me. That could have been my secret talent. I took my sandwich from the counter and sat down at an empty table near the windows, crammed into a corner. I checked my cell phone; I probably looked like a normal person with a normal job, except for the fact that my cell phone was conservatively six years out of date.

“So did you finally get a real job?” Ronaldo sat down at my table, like he was the most popular boy at school, trying to show how charitable he was by sitting with the local loser. I was some loser, so it certainly felt that way.

“Where the fuck did you come from?”

“What can I say? You have decent tastes in delis. What's wrong, buttercup? You look upset,” Ronaldo asked. It was hard to take him seriously as my unwanted, unpaid therapist, since he looked like the porn version of Crockett from _Miami Vice_ , except he had to wear a collared shirt, instead of a deep v t-shirt.

“I'm the stupidest person who's ever lived,” I replied.

“Well, I, for one, am surprised that you've just learned that.”

“Ha ha,” I said, “Shouldn't you be bothering your boyfriend? Eating your lunches with your beloved, instead of hassling me.”

“For you information, Señor Romantique, we broke up.”

“Was he not orange enough for you?”

“Shrimpy broke up with me.”

“Why?”

“That's none of your business, Baldy,” he chewed on his sandwich thoughtfully, “Is your friend with the fat ass still single?”

I decided that it would not be good to set up Gonzalo on dates one night after not sleeping at our apartment. I wasn't even certain if they broke up, technically. Hopefully, they didn't break up, since I would really appreciate the potentially adjusted rent if there were three of us living in our apartment. I said, “He's dating my roommate.”

Ronaldo shrugged lazily, “There's this woman in my building, whose been giving me the eye in the elevator. She has a crazy body. I'll probably talk to her later.”

“I thought you were gay.”

“Have you seen me? It would be a crime to deny anyone, regardless of gender, gender presentation, or sexuality, a chance at this body.”

“I forgot how modest you are. You must be great at parties.”

“I am a blast at parties. In fact, I saw those pictures on Facebook that your friend with the huge ass posted. Why didn't you invite me to your party?”

“Stalker much? First of all, it wasn't my party. Second of all, I didn't realize we were friendly enough for those kind of invitations to be warranted.”

“We're friends of convenience. We spend an inordinate amount of time together for people who are not friends nor coworkers. Which brings me back to my original point. Why don't you invite me to parties?”

“I didn't realize you wanted to go to shitty parties in the Bronx.”

“I haven't been invited to a party in a really long time.”

“I don't think I'll be invited to another one in a while.”

“So it's agreed. I'll take you clubbing.”

“When did we agree on this?”

“I made an executive decision. Wear what you're wearing now. If you change, I know you'll probably wear one of your dumb shirts with a rapper on it,” Ronaldo crumpled up his napkin, standing up to throw out his garbage, “Or those godawful jorts that you own. I'll find you later.”

I went to my office to work on some paperwork, since I figured I might as well go along with Ronaldo's idea. I wasn't busy with anything else in particular, so I figured it wouldn't be a completely bad idea to stay out of my apartment for as long as possible. Even before he left to go to work, Samir looked quite angry as we sat silently eating cereal.

It was roughly sun temperatures in my office, so I opened the window as wide as I could get it. I was armed with a giant water bottle that I bought at the Macaroni Hut and also made sure that the flashdrive was still where I left it, so it wasn't all that bad. I didn't turn on my comically oversized and old computer, so as to avoid adding more unwanted heat to the office. I even left the door open for the minor possibility of a cross breeze. That was a joke. I could feel all of my clothes swell with humidity, sticking to my body uncomfortably. It was enough to make me jealous of those women who wore sports bras and yoga shorts as normal clothes. When I was in Algeria, I mostly huddled near my grandfather's air conditioner for the entirety of six months. I was encouraged to engage with the local culture, but I largely avoided contact with other human beings.

There was a knock at the door and I looked up. A short guy in a suit was standing in the doorway.

“Are you Karim Benzema?” he asked.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“I'm looking to hire you for a case.”

“Is it something that needs to be looked at immediately? I kind of have my plate full at the moment,” I said. The guy had a prominent chin and the kind of artful scruffy beard that I longed to perfect. I said, “You know, there are a ton of other private detectives in New York that you might want to call if you want this solved immediately.”

Unfortunately, I did not have any numbers on hand immediately and I didn't want to turn on my dinosaur of a computer that would likely overheat and probably explode, with my luck.

“No, no, I want you to be my detective,” the man held out his hand for me; he had a huge blue smear of ink across the back of his hand. I stood up and shook it. He said, “My name is Juan Mata.”

I tried not to lie about myself to myself, so I knew something was very off in his insistence upon hiring me. I suppose it was possible that this guy was a real tightwad, but I knew that there was no pressing need for me and my lack of expertise to be investigating anything. Unless it related to the film, _Boiler Room,_ or the lifestyle choices of gay guys, I probably wouldn't be an expert.

“Are you sure? Have you read my Yelp reviews?”

“When you get the chance, you should call me back. My company would really like to hire you to help us with something,” Juan Mata said, handing me a business card. He left without saying good bye.

I looked down at the card:

> Juan Mata
> 
> Special Projects Manager
> 
> Stamford Bridge Worldwide
> 
> New York, NY, USA

It even had a blue Eye of Horus in the corner. I stuffed the card into the top drawer of my desk. Actually, I didn't know what to do, so I paced around my office about seven million times. Then, I took the card out of the drawer and looked at it for a couple minutes at a time. Studying it for reasons I didn't even understand.

Ronaldo arrived about a half hour into my contemplation session. He said flatly, snapping the card out of my hand, “Your office is disgusting. What's this?”

“Juan Mata stopped by. He wants me to investigate his case.”

“I wouldn't take it. Ruud van Nistelrooy's last case was from these weirdos who had tattoos like this on their hands. Egyptian eyes, right?”

Ronaldo led me out of my office, as he spoke, “Then, two weeks after they call him, he goes missing and three weeks after that, he's dead in the back of some stolen car.”

“Well fuck.”

“I know.”

“How do you know that anyway? Did Falcao tell you that?”

“As if I talk to that moron on a regular basis,” Ronaldo sneered, “Ruud was my beat partner when I was still out in the precint . He called me a month ago or something, sounding crazy.”

“Why did he get kicked off the NYPD?”

“I think he shot someone. Why aren't you on the police force? You know, since your buddy with the fat ass is an officer, I'd figure you'd want to get in on our exemplemary health insurance package.”

“I got arrested when I was twenty-one.”

“For what?”

“None of your business.”

“I'll just look it up later,” Ronaldo shrugged. We went down into the Subway station, as he said, “I'll just have to savor the moment I discover that you were some patsy for an inane drug smuggling ring. Maybe I'll tell Skunky. How long were you in jail for?”

“Jesus Christ. Just look it up next time you're in your office,” I replied, as we got onto a car.

It felt like everyone in the Subway car was looking at me, even though it was very unlikely that they would care.

“I'll just wonder the entire night what kind of degenerate I'm spending time with,” Ronaldo said cheerfully, putting his arm around my shoulder.

I had spent much of my late teen years and early twenties in gay bars, as a simple fact of being friends with Samir and Gonzalo. And this was not one I had been to, but clearly Ronaldo was a returning customer. It was a sausage fest, as far as the eye could see, with two lesbians wearing New York Liberty shirts at the end of the bar. I probably had more in common with them than Ronaldo and his friends.

Ronaldo disappeared into the crowd without even buying me a beer first. He totally didn't understand friend codes about parties. That's probably why no one invited him anywhere. They were probably all sick of getting left behind in strange bars, while Ronaldo was off, getting it in with male models. Or lady models, I guess.

I got one of those really fruity, electric blue drinks that tasted like all flavors of Gushers combined; the kind of drink you could only get when you were not trying to impress anyone sexually, since it had an orange slice as a garnish.

I considered talking to the lesbians about whether they thought the Knicks had a chance in the upcoming season, but then I worried about them possibly preferring the Nets. Ordinarily, if Jay-Z promoted anything, I was a fan, but unfortunately, I could not find within my soul to make the switch.

As I looked around the bar, trying to find Ronaldo again, or perhaps by some kismet someone else I knew, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was Ramos, with his goggle-eyed friend standing behind him, looking quite sullen.

“You're Nando's friend! Khalid, right?”

“Karim. You're Sergio, right?”

“Yeah. I'm terrible with names. You're pretty good though, huh?”

I shrugged, like I hadn't been virtually stalking him for two weeks, “I'm good at that kind of thing. Is Fernando here?”

“Nah. It's past Grandpa's bedtime,” Sergio said, reaching out to ruffle his goggle-eyed friend's hair, who seemed utterly uninterested in precedings, looking at his phone “This is Mesut. You didn't ping my gaydar, you know? Are you here with your boyfriend or something?”

I glanced around for Ronaldo, who was flexing his biceps for a skinny guy in a striped tanktop, who felt it appreciatively. I pointed, “Yeah. He's over there. We're always on the lookout for a third.”

Ramos nodded, as though he expected me to say that. I took a satisfied sip from my stupid blue drink. He said, “I've seen him around here a lot. Have you two been together long?”  
“We're really committed to each other. Can't get over him and his love of Speedos.”

“Aww. That's so sweet. How did you meet? Nando and I met in the Subway, the sandwich restaurant, you know, near the place where I work,” Ramos said, with his arm around goggle-eyed Mesut's shoulder. His free hand was resting on goggle-eyed Mesut's chest. As I sipped from my stupid blue drink, I realized that goggle-eyed Mesut was the guy from the Jersey Shore, the one that I photographed for Torres.

“Why are you cheating on Tor – Fernando?” I asked. Ramos was being quite obvious about it, considering I was supposed to be a friend of his primary lover.

“I'm not cheating on Nando,” Ramos screwed up his face in frustration, “He knows we're in an open relationship. Why? Did he tell you something different?”

“Well, he told me that he hired a private detective to follow you.”

“He fucking did what?”

Goggle-eyed Mesut tore his eyes away from his phone. He had a very noticable German accent, demanding, “Who did he hire?”

“Ruud van Nistelrooy,” I said, though I wasn't sure why. Both of them left the club immediately. I couldn't help but feel as though everything was off kilter.


	11. I've Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway

 I woke up on the couch in some apartment I had never seen before, but even as I attempted to make a silent exit, in the vein of several prior one-night stand escapes, I realized that I knew whose apartment I was in. The apartment was very urban spy, with a lot of dark appliances and furniture and gray wallpaper. There was a picture of Ronaldo with some smiling, curly-haired toddler stuck to the dark refrigerator with a magnet. The sexy spy effect was ruined when I almost decapitated myself, tripping over a brightly colored toddler's keyboard.

“Jesus Christ! Quiet down!” Ronaldo emerged from his bedroom, like a ghost. He was wearing, what I assumed were, his pajamas, though I was mildly surprised that he chose normal sleep pants and a t-shirt, instead of a silk robe and silk pajama set.

I pushed myself up from the floor, my foot pressing down on all of the keys of the stupid keyboard, playing them all at the same time.

“Did you break that?” he demanded, picking up the keyboard, without paying any attention to my well-being, “If you broke you, you'll owe me forty dollars. Junior loves this fucking thing.”

“I didn't realize you have a family,” I said, though it came out wrong.

“I assume your family left you in a park someplace and 'forgot' to pick you up twenty years ago. That's why you act like you've been raised by wolves.”

It felt very odd, looking at Ronaldo hold a kaleidoscopic keyboard in his giant hands. He looked vaguely like the Hulk holding an Easter Egg, if the Hulk was ever domesticated enough to ever engage in that kind of thing. I couldn't imagine him with a kid. Especially considering, all he did to me was swear at me and make fun of my clothes. Ronaldo was a schoolyard bully, who was unfairly smart and apparently raising a child, who would probably become just like him.

“Where's your kid?”

“Visiting Grandma, not that it's any of your business.”

“That's cool. That your kid gets to see his grandmother. My grandmother lives in Algeria.”

“Are you babbling? Is this your weird version of babbling?” Ronaldo quirked a well-manicured eyebrow, taking a step towards me, still holding that stupid keyboard.

“Yes. I think so.”

“Are you uncomfortable with the fact that I'm a father?”

“A little bit.”

“Why? It's not like we're dating. I thought you were straight.”

“I am. I just think it's weird. Is this why Leo broke up with you?”

“Well, aren't you some fucking detective? I've been annoyed by you for roughly two and a half years and you've finally solve a mystery. Congratulations,” Ronaldo sneered, stepping closer, “Now that you've got your answer. Why did you get arrested?”

I told him and I left. I checked my phone while I was on the train back to Yonkers. No one had texted me or called me. I assumed it was because I was useless and no one, justfiably, wanted nor needed to put up with my uselessness.

I got back to the apartment complex. Samir was sitting on the floor in the lobby, eating ice cream right out of the carton, with the rest of his groceries surrounding him in bags.

“What are you doing?”

“This is your fault,” he said, glaring at me with his spoon hovering over the Ben and Jerry's carton.

“What did I do now?”  
“Our apartment got broken into again. And it's your fault.”  
“My fault? I haven't been here since yesterday morning! Did they steal anything important?”

“I don't know. It's a complete mess. The police are still up there. They turned your bedroom upside down and wrote on our wall in ballpoint, I want to add, 'Drop the case.' I'm assuming it's you, since I don't have cases. What kind of lunatics are you hanging around? They don't have Sharpies apparently. They just use ballpoints to get their points across when breaking and entering.”

“Maybe it's yours. Lawyers have cases.”

“Law students don't. Unless we're dealing with a time traveling psychopath, it's not my fault,” he said, shoveling another spoonful of Phish Food into his mouth. He sneered, “If that's what actually happened, then I'm sorry for yelling at you.”

He continued, “This is great timing, isn't it? My parents are coming from Buffalo this weekend. Pipita's an ass. You're a moron and now our apartment's been broken into for the second time in a month. School's starting again in two weeks and my job is horrible.”

I sat down next to him, taking a banana out of his grocery bag.

“I was out for an hour,” he said, “An hour and our apartment got broken into. I have the best luck, huh?” Samir dropped his spoon into the half-soup sludgy mess of marshmallow, caramel, and ice cream, placing it on the suspiciously stained carpet gently, “Do you still hang out with your jail friends?”

“Why?”

“Pipita's not going to tell me who sells weed in this city. I figure you might, considering you're a felon and all.”

“I'd like to point that soliciting a prostitute in the state of New York is a misdemeanor, not a felony.”

“Whatever. I know you still smoke weed. Your new buddies left your bong on top of your piles of crap when they broke in. I need something to relax for a little bit,” Samir snapped, “BTW, I talked to your parents already. Your mom said I can sleep over tonight.”

“I have a rule of not smoking within seventy-two hours of seeing my parents. They can smell guilt.”

“You don't have to smoke anything. Just let's go visit your prison buddies and we'll go to Staten afterwards.”

“Fine.”

We gathered up the grocery bags, walking back to the train station. I had met Marcelo and Pepe during my two and a half days in jail. I was young, stupid, and extremely scared, so it was very good that two of my cellmates didn't want to murder me or make me a stuffed croissant. After I got out, we would play basketball sometimes and they continued to sell weed.

I knocked on Marcelo's apartment door. He lived in a crappy walkup, so he didn't have to buzz me up. Mareclo answered, hugging me, “El Gato! What's up, man?”

“Gato?” Samir asked.

Marcelo let us in, “So, what's going on?”

“My roommate wants some weed.”

“Too bad, bro. I ran out of stock. My friend, Sideshow Bob, has some. I think,” Marcelo flopped onto his patchwork sofa. He shouted for Pepe, “Hey! Abuelo! Gato's here!”

Pepe emerged from his room, patting me on the back, flopping onto the couch next to Marcelo. He squinted, looking at Samir, “Who are you?”

“Gato's roommate,” Samir replied.

“He wants Sideshow Bob's pot.”

“Why are you here, if Sideshow Bob's got the weed?” Pepe asked, glancing in the grocery bag that I was holding. He took an apple out.

“Gato was just stopping by,” Marcelo said, flicking at the apple.

“Where does Sideshow Bob live?”

“Brownsville”

“I'm not fucking going to Brownsville,” Samir said.

“So we're supposed to go to Brownsville for you? Which college do you go to? Hunter, Parsons or FIT?” Pepe asked, snarling as though an art student was lower than a lower rung drug dealer on the ranks of societal importance.

“I'll go,” I said, though Brownsville was far from the top of my list of places where I wanted to go, but if it got Samir off my back about the burglary, I'd finish things up. I continued, “Do you think we could smoke here, though?”

Pepe squinted at me, “You don't have a place?”

“Our apartment's getting fumigated and I'm not really in the mood for hanging out with a bunch of dirtbag kids in the park.”

Marcelo tapped Pepe's bald head, “Relax tio. You two can smoke here, as long as Big Mouth here cooks for us.”

“Am I Big Mouth?” Samir pointed to himself.

“Do you or do you not have a Big Mouth?” Pepe demanded. He was a bit full-on as a person. He had spent a little more time in jail than Marcelo and I did, since he put our fourth cellmate in a headlock when they were handing out stale cheese sandwiches for dinner the second night I was there.

Marcelo told me the address and I headed out. Samir grabbed my arm before I left, “Am I safe to stay with these people?”

“What do you think they're going to do? Murder you for making bad omelettes?”  
“I don't know. You're the only criminal I know. And I only live with you because Pipita and I weren't together two years ago.”

I shrugged. Pepe was prone to biting ears off, but Marcelo was pretty chill.

“Hey Gato! Get us some too! I'll pay you when you get back here!” Marcelo shouted from the couch; he had gotten involved in a FIFA match with Pepe, already.

I left. Eventually, I stood on the stoop of Sideshow Bob's building, looking at the apartment call box, determining which person was in fact, Sideshow Bob. There weren't any Roberts listed, so I assumed Sideshow Bob was a nickname bestowed on some unfortunate soul, who looked like the cartoon character. I was stuck between some guy named Kyle Beckerman and another guy who wrote “LEGALIZE IT” in his name space. I had texted Marcelo for the apartment number, but I was still waiting for him to get back to me.

The door opened when some woman left, holding her purse close to her body, so I went in anyway, even without knowing the apartment number. I decided to wait in the stairwell, where it was a little cooler than the lobby hallway. I stood in the stairwell, since most of the walls and railings looked either unsafe or covered in some suspicious substance.

The walls, apparently, were made out of paper. I heard the elevator ding in the lobby and I looked out the window into the hallway to see if it was someone who could reasonably be called “Sideshow Bob.” Instead, Fernando Torres glided through the hallway, on his phone, telling someone on the other end, “We should have know. Honeypots don't last long anyway!”

I ducked down as he passed. My heart had almost leapt into my mouth. He probably wanted to kill me. My phone vibrated and I had the apartment number: 4A. Sideshow Bob had his door opened a crack when he answered it, “So what do you need, Geezer?”

“My friend, Marcelo said that you could help me with something.”

“You know Marcelo? Do you have a nickname from him?”  
“Yeah, he calls me el Gato.”

He let me in, tentatively. Sideshow Bob did live up to his name, with pretty long, poodle curly hair. A Mets game was playing on television in front of a lone torn-up recliner; they were losing miserably to the Braves, which was far from an usual. It was downright comforting to know that despite everything I was experiencing the World was functioning as usual.

Sideshow Bob noticed that I was watching the game, “Geezer, are you a Mets fan?”

“I don't hate myself quite that much.”

In fifteen minutes, I was heading back to Marcelo's apartment. Back at Marcelo and Pepe's apartment, Samir answered; his shirt had new stains.

“They don't stop eating,” he whispered, sounding much like a horror movie victim, who had seen a mythical serial killer lop off a head. Instead, Samir had only made a week's worth of lunches for a couple of stoners.

I sat on the floor next to Samir, while Marcelo and Pepe enjoyed the couch. It was their drug den and we were merely being given to priveledge to partake while in their domicile. Though I wasn't really partaking in any kind of fun, since we were going to have to see my parents, who already thought I was on drugs, even when they didn't have any reason to suspect that.

Samir took a hit and passed the pipe and the lighter to Pepe. I was looking at my text messages, trying desperately to see if anyone tried to text me or call me and I somehow missed it. It was kind of pathetic that I hadn't had any phone/SMS contact with anyone, other than Marcelo, in over twelve hours. Samir picked up something from the floor.

“Gato, is this yours?” he asked. It was a complete mistake to bring him to meet Marcelo and Pepe. He was probably going to refer to me as el Gato for the rest of my life. It wasn't even a nickname that had a funny backstory or a backstory that made me seem remotely normal or cool. I didn't want to take a shower while in jail because I had seen enough episodes of _Oz_ and heard enough schoolyard jokes to know what happened when incarcerated naked men got all soaped up. Marcelo and Pepe said I was afraid of water, like a cat, so everyone in our cell started calling me “el Gato.”

I looked up from my cell phone. He was holding the business card that Juan Mata had given to me the day before.

“For fuck's sake, Karim! You're involved with Stamford Bridge now?”  
“What?”  
“First Anfield International, now Stamford Bridge? What's next? Westends?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Of course you don't know. You haven't watched the news in ten years. Stamford Bridge is the biggest military contracting group in Europe. They're so fucking big that allegedly they're paying off the mayor to continue operations in New York. They're so fucking big that Anfield's lost its relative prestige and like half of their employees because Stamford Bridge gobbled them up.”

“Like they killed the guys from Anfield International?”

“In some cases, maybe. But some guys apparently left their jobs at Anfield to start working at Stamford Bridge. It was some sort of big deal.”

“What if a guy from Anfield got an offer from Stamford Bridge, but refused it?”

“Their owner puts a hit on him—I don't know. They're big competition with each other.”

I didn't say anything in response, instead, I was considering what that meant for me.

“You know that the Stamford Bridge guys have to get tattoos to show that they'll stay loyal to the cause.”

“What does the tattoo look like?”

Marcelo and Pepe weren't really paying attention to us, preferred to focus on their new round of FIFA. Pepe passed the pipe and lighter back to Samir. Samir said, waving the pipe and lighter, “That eye that you see in ancient Egyptian tombs. You know? With the lines underneath. It's on their card, see?”

Well double fuck.


	12. Work It, Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the transfer window went insane. Sorry for the delay in posting. Most of the chapter had been written earlier in the week, but I spilled water on my laptop keyboard.

**One Day Later...**

I was working on some paperwork with my beat partner, Chori, for roughly half of our shift. It was late Monday evening, meaning that I was going to miss _Masterchef_ , which was really displeasing. Living with my parents after two weeks of living with Samir and Karim was like living with Alzheimer's patients. I must have taught them how to use the DVR roughly twenty times, but somehow, they still managed to delete my carefully curated collection of _Dance Moms_ , replacing them with an ungodly amount of _House Hunters International_. As a lazy human person, I never really wanted to be at work, but if I was going to miss my fourth favorite television show, I was going to be miserable.

“You remember that guy?” Chori asked, looking more and more like Teen Wolf, as the night wore on, and making just about as much sense as the television show did.

“What guy?  I happen to know a lot of guys.”

“That guy who showed his junk to those people on the Subway?  I’m working on that citation.”

I flipped through my citation book, “Niklas Bendtner.”

It was getting dire.  As the hour wore on, Masterchef was slipping through my fingers.  Everyone else in the office insisted upon watching the Yankees game, like a bunch of savages.  I had suffered greatly throughout my life, due to my allegiance to the Mets.  Karim was always a Yankees fan; I assumed that having grown up in the forgotten borough, he clung to every remnant of New York culture, mostly by hijacking the “winning” sports teams, rather than living in a state of self-imposed frustration.  Samir grew up in Buffalo and preferred to watch the Blue Jays, for reasons only God could understand.

Our radios crackled to life, “This is headquarters.  Officer Gonzalo Higuaín must report to 1PP.  Repeat:  Higuaín must report to the Major Case office.”

“Were we the responding officers to a kidnapping that I forgot about?” Chori asked.

“If we were, why didn’t they call for you too, dummy?” I said, picking my hat, shoving my paperwork towards Chori to head off to One Police Plaza.

The Major Case detectives never seemed to run a particularly orderly office.  I had only been there a few times, usually to hang around with Ronaldo, when we were messing around.  That day, the main office was in chaos:  it was as though they had thrown files around like confetti.  Three detectives were rifling madly through file bins, sitting on the floor, still in their suits.  I approached them cautiously.  Fabio Coentrão and the Callejón twins looked up wordlessly.

“What do you guys need me for?”

Coentrão quirked an eyebrow, “The taskforce wants you.”

“Yeah.  For what?  Chori and I haven’t seen you guys since the Cantona art theft thing.”

“Are you for real?” one of the Callejónes asked.  I think it was Chema.

“What do you mean?”  
“Oh shit,” the other Callejón, Juanmi presumably, whispered dramatically, “He doesn’t know.”

“Is this like a game?”

Ronaldo’s office door opened.  Ronaldo poked his head out, “Oy!  Fat ass!  Get over here!”

Ronaldo had a corner office, typically reserved for a boss, but the Chief of Detectives gave it to him, since he had broken a record on becoming the most quickly promoted detective in the history of the NYPD.  He became a first grade detective before he turned twenty-eight, so everyone was mandated by unofficial law to kiss his ass.  It was kind of frustrating and unsatisfying to see someone who was such an egomaniac be so good at his chosen career.  Ronaldo’s office, in theme, was still very urban sex addict, but unlike usually circumstances, it was full of people I somewhat recognized, but didn’t exactly know.

“Okay,” Ronaldo clapped his hands together, “So everyone’s on the same page, right?  Now, let’s -”

I raised my hand, “I literally have no idea why I’m here.”

“Inviting him was your idea,” the little detective from Organized Crime that was Ronaldo’s latest ex-boytoy.  I wasn’t supposed to know; I wasn’t sure if anyone actually knew, Karim didn’t know how to shut up.  I had quit the private detective game before Karim became the laughing stock of the New York Police Department, so I didn’t meet half of the detectives that Karim knew.

“You’re here because you’re Benzema’s friend,” Ronaldo said flatly.

“So?  I’ve been his friend since we were fourteen.  No one’s invited to a taskforce before,” I said.

“You’ve been friends with him for fifteen years and you didn’t know he was reported missing?”

Fifteen years?  For God’s sake, I was only twenty-four.  Wait.  Missing?  Karim was missing?  And no one told me?  I had to learn from a bunch of sweaty detectives in a sticky office without air conditioning?  I thought his parents liked me more than they liked him.  Surely, if Karim was reported missing, they’d have invited me to live with them to replace him.  Honestly, who would even bother to kidnap Karim anyway?  He was heavy and didn't even watch  _RuPaul's Drag Race,_ thusly he was useless to most of humanity.

“Are you sure?  His parents have probably reported him missing before.  Mr. and Mrs. Benzema once thought Karim got stolen by gorillas when he got lost in the Bronx Zoo.”

Ronaldo read from a manilla folder, in a very annoyed tone, “He was reported by Marcelo Vieira, some guy named Pepe, and Samir Nasri.”

“That fucker didn’t tell me?”  
“Excuse me?”

“Well, it turns out that if you keep a Grindr profile up just a little too long, you learn that your best friend’s missing via ex-fuck buddy.”

One of the homicide detectives raised his hand, “I have a question.  Why am I wasting my time with this taskforce bullshit?  Arda and I should be the lead detectives on this case.  We already know that his kidnapping has a significant amount of similarities with the murders of the private detectives.”

“The murdered private detectives?” I blurted out.

“Because there’s no proof he’s dead yet, Falcao.  Right now, all we know is that he was likely kidnapped,” Ronaldo spoke over me, “I have a bit more experience with living victims than you.”

“We all know how it’s going to turn out, Ronaldo.  Let’s not try to fool ourselves into thinking this one guy will avoid what happened to the other two, okay?” Falcao said, “I should be the lead detective on this case.”

“He’s not dead yet.  There’s no proof he’s dead.  Therefore he’s not dead yet.”

“You’ve met Benzema,” Falcao glanced at me, somewhat warily, “We all know he’s not the smartest banana in the bunch.  He’s a goner.”

Ronaldo, who wasn’t someone to mess with on a good day, replied quietly, “He’s not dead, okay?”

I didn’t know how to respond, since clearly, I would have obviously preferred for Karim to be alive, but I wasn’t completely oblivious to how this thing usually worked out.  I appreciated Ronaldo’s denial of probabilities.  I wondered absently how his parents were dealing with it.

Falcao turned to his partner to whisper something.  Ronaldo’s short ex-boytoy passed a note to Kun Agüero, a detective from the Missing Person Squad.  Ronaldo saw this and nearly leapt over his desk, “Is there something you’d like to share with the class, Messi?”

“For fuck’s sake, Cris, you’re acting like a crazy person.”

“Kun, read the note out loud!” Ronaldo insisted.

Kun Agüero read aloud, “‘After the meeting, ask Higuaín if Benzema has a girlfriend or anyone who would know about the last case he was working on.’”

“Too late for that, Messi!  I was already going to do that!” Ronaldo snapped; his eyes were kind of bulgy and he had eyebags.  This was not to mention the fact that his shirt had a coffee stain on it and his belt was on wrong.  Something was clearly wrong with him; Ronaldo took his appearance very seriously.  The coffee stain on his shirt was one of the major indicators that he had clearly lost it, as I knew for a fact that Ronaldo kept extra shirts in his supply closet just for this kind of situation.  The eyebags were the kicker:  he slept with teabags on his eyes in order to reduce wrinkles.  Maybe he felt guilty about calling Karim “Mount Saint Baldy” and that his guilt about humiliating Karim on a regular basis was eating away at his conscience.

“So does he?” Agüero asked, “Have a girlfriend?”

“Not a girlfriend per sé.  I know he kept running into some girl that he was sleeping with.”

“Would she know anything about his latest case?”

I shrugged.  I honestly didn’t know all that much about her, except that he ran into in a sketchy-ass bar in Midtown, having already met her in Jersey.  Karim was kind of bad about remembering details that personally important.  The other detectives were clearly annoyed and were split up to work on different aspects of the case.  The only three that were left in the office were me, Ronaldo, and Ronaldo’s tiny ex-boytoy.  I was somewhat insulted that Ronaldo decided to replace me with a pasty, little guy with no ass to speak of.  It might have been a bit arrogant, but I ranked  my ass top three in the City, so it was obvious to see that Ronaldo took a step down.

Ronaldo sneered at me, “Listen up, Nancy Drew, do not investigate this or I will find you and murder you.”

“Jesus Christ?  Do you think so little of me?”

“I swear.  Let the real detectives handle this.  Just because you got a useless piece of paper five fucking years ago does not mean that you can adequately investigate a real crime.”

“Five years ago, I was nineteen, studying Musical Theory at Queensborough Community College.  No one thought I was going to be a detective.”

“Good Lord.  That is so not the point,” Ronaldo rubbed his eyes, “Jesus fucking Christ.  You and Baldy are the same person, aren’t you?  You two should get married when he annoys his captors into freeing him.”

# -

"Hey Samir.  Do you know what that guy's name is?" I examined my cuticles with my cell phone pressed up against my ear, probably using my cell phone as a phone for the first time in three months.

"Please be more vague.  What are you talking about?" Samir asked; his voice was laden with sleep, all sexy-like.

"I'm in hipster heaven.  What's that guy's name that Karim was using as an intern?"

"No one said that you were working on the case."

"I'm going full Hardy boy over here.  What's his name?   I'm going to look him up on Facebook and ask around."

"You can't go Dirty Harry, moron.  I don't want to be the only one of us to still be alive tomorrow."

"Well then, bonito, come to Brooklyn.  We can die together.  What's the kid's name first?"

"Raphaël Varane.  But you can't do anything, okay?  I need you to not investigate."

"Too late.  If you come out to Brooklyn, bring me some of Karim's clothes," I said., hanging up on Samir before he replied.  I looked up Raphaël on Facebook on my phone.  Good old Karim was our only mutual friend, so I could see Raphaël's picture.

The bartender at the first bar I went to didn't recognize Rapahël, but he did seem a little freaked out to talk to a cop, like I was going to tattle on him because of the obviously underaged hipsters standing around the bar, holding Pabst Blue Ribbons.

"I'm not here to bust you.  I'm actually off-duty.  I don't see any of this, you don't see me.  Comprende?  Have you seen this kid around lately?"

Some guy with curly hair and a headband that looked rather familiar was looking over the bartender's shoulder.  He asked, " What are you looking for Rapha for?"

"Do you know where he lives?"

"Yeah.  He lives a block over.  Do I know you?"

"Probably.  What's his address?"

"Are you the guy from Grindr by messaging me from your bed?  And you called me 'hola bonita?'" That did sound a lot like something I would do, so I shrugged and told him that I had a twin named Raúl Albiol, who did that kind of thing all the time.  Pirata, or so he liked to refer to himself, wrote down the address and I was almost on my way.

"Jesus Christ, Pipita!" Samir was running up the street.  It had been about forty-five minutes since we had last spoken, "You are the stupidest ex-detective on the planet.  I include Karim in that."

"How the hell did you get here from Yonkers so quickly?  How did you know where I was?"

"I was on Staten Island providing emotional support for our beloved friend's insane parents.  And as for your second question, you still have a tracker app on your phone, dummy," Samir said, shoving a backpack into my hands.  He continued, "If we die, I will never forgive you.   I will give you the silent treatment in the afterlife."

"So you're afraid that he's dead too?"

"Absolutely terrified."

I went into the nearest bar's bathroom.  It was Monday, so it wasn't too bad, but it was still a bar bathroom, so every little stain was certainly suspicious.  Samir somehow managed to grab Karim's jorts and an eyesore of a t-shirt.  We were finally ready to go.

On the way up the stairs, I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?  I heard from the detectives.”

“Honestly, you completely slipped my mind.  Mrs. Benzema just about lost her mind.”

I knocked on Raphaël's apartment door.  The guy who answered was very familiar, really tall and skinny; I probably had passingly saw him at Ángel's party.  He asked, "Are you Karim's gay friends?"

"You haven't seen him lately, have you?"

"Not since that party that we all went to.  Why?  Is he in trouble or something?"

"He's missing."

"Anfield International killed him, didn't they?  Oh fuck me, I'm next, aren't I?" he said, "No offense, but you guys have to leave."

"Anfield International was after him?  Fuck!”

I looked at Samir, for explanation, “What are you talking about?”

“They’re a military contracting group.  Karim’s been talking to them and Stamford Bridge.”

“He was talking to Stamford Bridge, too?” Raphaël shouted, “You are not coming in here.  In fact, I’m booking a trip out of the country as soon as possible.”

“We’re looking for him,” I said, “We need your help.”

“Get the police.  That’s their job,” Raphaël went to slam the door, but I shoved my foot in between the door and the jamb.

“And I’m his best friend.  You wanted to help Karim play detective a month ago; you’re going to help us play detective right now, got it?”

“You’re the last guy who saw him, right?” Samir said; he neglected to mention that tidbit of information to me; however, I hadn’t really gotten the full story from anyone.  Ronaldo’s taskforce meeting probably would have been a good place to get some semblance of a narrative, but unfortunately, that careened off the rails rather quickly, all things considered.

“I haven’t seen him since that dumb party.  I said that already.  Anything that happened after that, I don’t know about it,” Raphaël said, stepping aside so we could go into the apartment.  It was very cramped in the apartment, with the focal point of the living room being the television.

“What were you guys doing with your case?” I asked.

“We were supposed to find some guy named Steven Gerrard, except we found a flash drive that had some shady info on it.  That’s about it.  Everything we did came back to this weird circular pattern around Anfield International,” Raphaël said, picking up a laptop from the coffee table.

“What happened to the flash drive?” Samir asked.

“I don’t know.  Karim said he hid it.  I think someone knew that we were holding onto it.”

“When did you find the flash drive?”

Raphaël shrugged, not looking up from his laptop, “I don’t know.  A week and a half ago, maybe?  Maybe two weeks?”

Samir grabbed my arm, “That’s the first time that our apartment got broken into.  They opened up all of the stuff because they were looking for something.”

Raphaël asked to no one in particular, “Do you think I should tell my parents to get out of the country, too?”

“No one’s fleeing the country.  You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.

“It’s not like kidnappers really care about obeying the law,” Raphaël replied, “I don’t know what else you guys want from me?”

“Would you mind talking to a detective?”

Raphaël shrugged again, focusing on his computer rather than our conversation.

“Why did you think Karim saw Raphaël anyway?” I asked Samir, “From what I figured from Ronaldo and the other detectives, you and Karim’s druggie friends were the last ones to see him.”

“He called me after he went to talk to the police about something.  He said he had an inspiration.  Anyway, he said Ronaldo and whoever else he knows in the police department weren’t in because it was Sunday.  He said that he had to go to Brooklyn because Raphaël needed him or something.  Something to do with a roommate or something.”

“I really did not speak to him since that party.”

“I know. We all know that,” I replied, “Maybe someone knew he was alone or something.  Did he say who he talked to at the police department, if he did go in?”  
“No.  Probably a clerk or something.”

“Does Ronaldo know this?”

“Duh, Pipita.  I told him everything.  It’s not like I’m going to avoid telling him that.  They’re probably looking at surveillance tapes or something to see who Karim talked to,” Samir said, “What about the flash drive?  What was on it that was so important?”

“I don’t know.  Karim didn’t know either.  I couldn’t break the encryption on it, so I had my neighbor look at it,” Raphaël said, closing his laptop dejectedly, “There aren’t any flights to Canada that are cheaper than five hundred bucks in the next two days.  If I get killed, I might as well avoid more debt, huh?”

“Which neighbor?” I asked.  Raphaël led us to an apartment a floor below where he knocked on the door.  No one responded.  Raphaël knocked a little more forcefully, calling “Luka!  It’s me, Rapha!”

I reached out and pressed down on the door handle.  It opened quite easily.

“I don’t think we’re allowed to go in there,” Raphaël hesitated to follow me.  Samir pretended not to notice that the door was even open and turned right around, focusing on the door across the hall intently.

“Luka?” I called out.  It was creepy quiet in the apartment.  It was fairly bare, no posters or anything or any indication that this Luka guy enjoyed anything or had any friends, but I wasn’t in a position to judge, as I still lived with my parents, despite being completely able to support myself.  Renting my own apartment seemed a scary enough leap into adulthood; buying a house would have been emotionally impossible, probably.  I flipped on a light switch; there wasn’t a skeleton or a dead body or anything to launch me into a shock or anything.  It was just really quiet, except for the occasional drip from a faucet, as though the faucet was broken.  If anything, the light just revealed a normal apartment without any evident secrets.

I turned around to head out and I noticed a small table near the door, where Luka probably usually left his keys and wallet.  An old black Motorola Razr flip phone was resting on top of some old Penny Savers.  The only moron who still had one of those phones in 2012 was Karim Benzema and that was because he always managed to lose his phone before he could get an appropriate upgrade.

“Hey, Raphaël?  What does Luka do for a living?” I shouted; Raphaël and Samir were still in the hallway.  Samir was still pretending that I had fallen into another dimension, while Raphaël was peering into the apartment curiously, but could not bring himself to cross the boundary into the apartment.

“He works for Bernabéu Industries.”

“Jesus Christ.  It’s like we’re in _Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy_.  Except with businesses,” Samir said, still with his back to the apartment doorway.

“Why didn’t you just say _Duplicity_?” I demanded.  Who didn’t enjoy a good Clive Owen/Julia Roberts comedy thriller?  It certainly fit more than _Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy_.

“Because you’re the only person who remembers that movie.”

“Can we focus?  Is Luka in there?” Raphaël asked.

“No.  But he would have a smart phone, right?  Not a flip phone from 2006, right?” I replied.

“No one has a flip phone.”

“So it’s pretty safe to say that this phone is Karim’s, right?”

“Don’t pick it up!  Shouldn’t we call the police or something?”

I picked it up and flipped it open.  There was a voice mail from the morning.  I dialed the password (1994, the year that _Illmatic_ was released) and waited to hear the new message, “Mr. Benzema, we are pleased to inform you that your student loan has been approved.  Please call us back or return to the bank in order to discuss a payment plan.”

Another piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.  I took the phone with me into the hallway, “This is Karim’s.”

“Great.  Let’s call the cops.  This Luka guy has Karim and might be murdering him right now.”

I looked through the phone a little more and gave it to Raphaël and Samir to look at it, too.  Raphaël’s number hadn’t called him recently, nor had he even sent a text message to Karim’s phone since the party incident.  The only thing that stood out was a received call that lasted a minute and forty-five seconds that didn’t have any contact information attached to it.

Ultimately, Samir, Raphaël, and I waited outside of Luka’s apartment.  I replaced the phone back on top of the Penny Savers.  Ronaldo and the little detective from Organized Crime showed up after an hour.

Ronaldo still looked like he had gone on a bender; his eyebrows even seemed slightly less groomed than usual, “What did I tell you about investigating, Frank Hardy?  I like that you’ve picked up a Joe Hardy and a Chet Morton.”

The little detective sighed, “You’ve been doing the same thing that he’s been doing, Cris.”

“What’s the clue you found?”

“We believe that Karim’s phone is on the table inside of this particular apartment.”

“You know what?  I don’t want to know how you figured that one out.  I want all three of you gone before I go inside of that apartment.  An anonymous tip brought us here, okay?” Ronaldo sighed, “Get out of here before I change my mind.”

“Just so you know, there is an already listened to message on his voice mail and the password is 1994,” I told Ronaldo, tapping him on the cheek, “The door’s unlocked.”

Raphaël, Samir, and I went back to Raphaël’s apartment.  Raphaël dialed a phone on his iPhone, explaining, “I think that one of the numbers on Karim’s phone seemed familiar.”

Samir and I sat on the sofa in Raphaël’s apartment, while Raphaël tried calling someone on his phone.  Samir said, “I don’t want any news from anyone.  I just don’t want to know.”

I touched Samir’s hand, entwining my fingers with his.  I said, “Remember when we all first met?  I bet you didn’t think that this is where you’d be in six years?”

“I thought that you and Karim were dating because you were in all of his MySpace pictures,” Samir said, leaning into me.

“I forgot that MySpace existed.”

“What a time to be alive, 2006 was,” Samir said.

The next day, I went to work, having done nothing during the morning but chew my fingernails to their stumps and check Facebook to an unusually excessive degree.  Since I worked during the daylight hours, I had a split shift, where one week I worked mornings-to-afternoons and the next week I would work afternoons-to-evenings.  I usually preferred to have the afternoon-to-evening shift so I wouldn’t have to wake up early, but I wanted to get in as soon as possible to see if Ronaldo had made any headway.  He wasn’t responding to any of my hundreds of texts; he probably blocked me.

I left early to stop by the Major Case offices before heading to the precinct office to go on the beat with Chori.  It looked like the calm after the storm, but with all of the wreckage still laying strewn about.  Ronaldo was sitting at a desk in the communal office space, looking positively zen, drinking from a coffee cup with his eyes shut.  He hadn’t shaved in a while, with the faint beginnings of a beard and his eyebrows looking slightly bushy.

“Are you okay?” I asked, approaching him with the care of a zoologist approaching a rabid animal, but feeling much more like the Crocodile Hunter grappling for a wild reptile’s tail.

“I have been removed from a case for the first time in my entire career,” his eyes were still shut.  What exactly did that mean?  Did it mean that it got tossed to the Missing Persons Squad?  Or was there a concrete reason to get the case kicked over to Falcao and the other homicide detectives?

“There hasn’t been proof, has there?  That he’s been…”

“Nope.  Not even a little.”

“Why’d you get removed from the case, then?” I said, a small bubble of relief popped; I still felt nauseous with fear, though.

“I’ve never been kicked off of a case by the CIA before,” Ronaldo opened his eyes, glancing at me, “It figures that that fucking moron would get the CIA involved in my work.”

“Why aren’t you in your office?”

“The CIA fuckers have comandeered it.  I’m out here until they find Benzema.”

“Are you okay, though?  You look kind of terrible,” I said.  He shrugged.

I went over to go spy in on the CIA through the little window in Ronaldo's office door.  They put a tape over Ronaldo’s nameplate on the door, so it said “Hope Solo, CIA.”

I headed out to the precinct, even though I didn't really want to leave Ronaldo alone.  He did look like he was ready to die.  My shift was quite miserable in all.  Chori and I gave tickets to a bunch of double parked Trans Ams.  It made me feel slightly better to ruin someone else’s day.


	13. Since My Heart is Golden

 I hadn't seen my roommate since Sunday and it was Tuesday night when I really started to get worried. On Monday, I hadn't really noticed, since Monday night got hijacked with worry about Karim. During the day on Tuesday, I spent most of my time on Staten Island, with Karim's family, who all huddled around the house phone, unsuccessfully willing it to ring.

His family actually quite overbearing, although in a well-meaning way, but there was only so much I could take of the various Benzemas offering me various kittens that they had raised in their various houses or apartments scattered across the Eastern Seaboard or of them yelling at each other in French about who's fault this whole thing was. Popular consensus seemed to be that statistics had led them all to this moment: if one of the eleven of them was going to be kidnapped, it was probably going to be Karim. Karim's roommate, Samir, was with them; Karim's family clearly knew him better than they knew me, considering I only had one meal with four of them. When I got back to my apartment, I expected to at least see the remnants of Oscar's dinners or hear him playing FIFA on the Xbox or something. The apartment was empty and the note that I left for him was still stuck to the fridge.

I turned on CNN. There was a public investigation into possible collusion between the mayor of New York City, Jose Mourinho, and the owner of some nondescript large company, Roman Abramovich. I tried to engage Karim in some level of conversation about it, but he barely knew the President's name, let alone anything that actually happened outside of his eyeline. That was a lie; somehow, he had found out that Jay-Z and Nas were going to collaborate on a song and he nearly exploded when he told me. I don't know how he found out, since he barely owned a computer and had a phone from the mid-00s, like he was in some seven year time warp.

I was becoming worried about Oscar. Clearly, I was already worried about Karim, so what was worrying about another person that I was acquainted with. I did know Karim much better than I knew Oscar, even though I had only known Karim for a month and Oscar for a year.

Oscar was only our roommate because we had mutual friends, through Casemiro, who had lived on our floor in our dormitory in our freshman year at NYU. Álvaro, Nacho, and I needed another to make rent a bit more afordable, so we asked Oscar. He was pretty chill and everything, but for whatever reason, Oscar and I simply never got each other. I called his cell phone several times over the course of the previous few days, but he never responded. He didn't answer my texts. I didn't know what to do.

Casemiro was in Spain for the summer to do his study abroad program. Álvaro and Nacho were both at their homes for the summer, so they were all of little help. I was alone in New York City, with the two of people I associated the most were gone. One of them officially, with a police investigation and everything. The other was just gone, though whether or not his disappearance warranted an investigation was beyond me. Well, I did talk to other people, like my neighbor, Luka, who had also seemed to drop off the face of the face of the Earth, although he was being investigated, since Pipita had found Karim's cell phone in his apartment; I hadn't seen him lately either.

I turned off the television, being unable to concentrate, so I went for a walk, hoping to clear my mind. Or as clear as it could get, all things considered. I had spoken to my parents the night before and declined to tell them about Karim's disappearance, so I didn't really want to tell them about Oscar possibly having disappeared, which would have meant that I would have had to tell them about Karim and all of the stuff that I worked on with him. Like, what if Karim had been in Williamsburg and got kidnapped with Oscar because crazy military contractors thought that Oscar was me? Not that Oscar and I could be confused for each other in any physical way, but if they didn't know what I looked like, I guess Oscar could be confused for a “Raphaël Varane.”

I did tell my sister that I had a crush on Karim, so I also didn't want to have to explicate all of my emotions, while she waxed poetic over a torrid “love lost” or something like that. To me, it was very simple: he was funny, although admittedly usually unintentionally, and he was cute. He was my friend and I certainly didn't want him dead, but the whole love angle was a little over-the-top. It was much more moderate of a feeling towards him than my sister imagined; she was still in high school, so I guess she was still in the “my heart belongs to one true love” phase of life.

As I walked down the stairs, I noticed something strange about the plant on the landing; it had a thin black cord poked out of the leaves, hanging over the lip of the pot. It looped over, so I reached in and pulled the cord out. The cord turned to be headphones, still attached to an old classic white iPod. No one in the building still had an iPod independent of their phone, as far as I knew, anyway.

I picked it up to look for clues as to who it might belong to. There wasn't an engraving on the back; it was mostly scratched up and scuffed. I turned it on; it only had about fourteen percent battery life left, so the little icon in the corner was red. The song that evidently had played was Lil B; the iPod probably did not belong to any of my neighbors. I looked through the playlists, hoping to find a playlist like “Todd's Workout Mix” or “Michelle's Roadtrip Songs!”

Instead, it was mostly numbered playlists. Others were “Jogging” and “S Birthday Party.” the last one was “Benze Benze Benzema.” And that playlist was just one song, “Twurk It Like Dat.” It figured. I had no clue that a song with that title even existed. Well, I hadn't listened to the radio in four years, so I didn't know about what the average person was listening to or what Karim was listening to.

I reached into the plant again and pulled out a brown leather wallet. I flipped it open. The license picture was of Karim, at approximately age seventeen, with crazy curly dark hair. I called Pipita, Karim's police officer friend. He got to Williamsburg at about 11:45PM, still in his uniform.

“I called the detective from yesterday. You met Ronaldo, right?” Pipita asked, tossing his hat onto the couch, “Anyway, he's super down in the dumps after the CIA snaked his case.”

“The CIA is on this?”

“It's this whole big gossip wheel in the department. I heard about it directly from Ronaldo himself, but everyone's been talking about it anyway. I heard from this sargeant, Carvalho, that Ronaldo had fucked up the case by just accepting the case, even though he was supposed to bounce it over to homicide, since Falcao had the other disappeared detectives cases,” Pipita was talking a million miles a minute, “The Chief of Detectives, Casillas, had to put out an official e-mail to the entire department to stop the rumor that Ronaldo got fired for sleeping with Karim.”

“Karim slept with Ronaldo?” I asked; Pipita's storytelling abilities were certainly limited, though he appeared to have a little glee in recounting gossip.  
“Please, Karim would so not go after my sloppy seconds. And he's super straight,” Pipita said, continuing, “According to López, my friend from IA, this is the busiest he's been in years. They've even had to put Ronaldo on temp leave.”

“But that detective didn't do anything wrong, right?”

“Well, he's still been anonymously accused. The NYPD is the most gossipy place I've ever worked,” Pipita said, flopping himself onto my couch, “And I've worked at the Gap with my ex-girlfriend's bff.”

“If Ronaldo's been put on leave, is he allowed to look at this stuff?”  
“Think about it like we're in an episode of _NCIS_ or _Psych_. We've been taken off the case by the chief, but we're going outside the law to solve the crime. Wait, that was in _Robocop 3_.”

There was a knock at my apartment door. I got up to answer it. That detective, Ronaldo, didn't look as groomed as the time that I saw him in Jersey with that other tiny guy. His hair wasn't gelled and it was all curly. He was even wearing cargo shorts and a t-shirt that said, “Yo Quiero Taco Bell.” Ronaldo asked, “Is this the apartment where that moron with an ass the size of the Moon told me to meet him?”  
I nodded. Pipita stood up and sized up Ronaldo, looking him up and down, “What the fuck happened to you? Is that dorito dust on your shirt?”  
“I got the shirt free when I bought a Doritos Locos Taco.”

“You haven't eaten carbs in six years. What is happening to you?” Pipita demanded.

“I'm not impressing anyone. I will never be able to impress anyone ever again, so I might as well give up before I stress myself out into an early grave,” Ronaldo said, sounding seriously, like he actually believed himself, while spouting the most melodramatic nonsense I'd ever heard, “Why'd you make me come here?”

“I've got a clue for you. To help you find Karim,” Pipita said, pointing at the iPod and the wallet that was on my kitchen table.

“I'm not a detective at the moment. Haven't you seen the e-mails from Iker Casillas? Why didn't you call Special Agent Solo?”

“We'll be renegade officers. We'll be like Steven Segal from his movie. You know the one.”

“ _Half Past Dead_?”

“No.”

“ _Out for a Kill_?”

“No. Jesus, no.”

“ _Driven to Kill_?”

“No. _Outside the Law_.”

“That's not a movie by Steven Segal, you idiot,” Ronaldo's eyes narrowed, annoyed, “I don't get the point of this.”

“I didn't know you've seen that many Steven Segal movies,” Pipita remarked, raking his fingers through his short hair, “Anyway, we'll figure where Karim is? And we'll get all the glory and you'll get your job back.”

Ronaldo laughed, “Please. You are cutting into my chance to eat a thing called a bread bowl from Domino's.”

“Is your version of a bender going on a carb binge?”

“Yuk it up, Stretch,” Ronaldo said to me, not even caring that he hadn't bothered to learn my name, “When your career has been ruined by a bunch of bureaucrats, I'll laugh in your face, too.”

He went over to the cabinets to look inside, pulling out of a bag of Cheetos that Oscar had squirreled away earlier in the Summer. That reminded me, in a perverse way.

“You know, my roommate's missing, too.”

“You're some disappearance magnet, huh?” Pipita said, “Have you called the police about that?”

“You're here now.”

“Hey, Ronaldo,” Pipita approached Ronaldo gently, who was shoving Cheetos into his mouth with the intensity of an insane pothead, “You think that you could figure out where Raphaël's roommate went.”

“He's dead,” Ronaldo said, between chomps, “Just like that bald moron. All dead.”

“Karim's not dead,” Pipita said firmly. He rubbed his hands together, “Okay, let's figure out something. We'll figure something out. And we won't have to alert the CIA. And you'll get your job back.”

Pipita tapped the wall, leaning against it, apparently trying to think, “Now, your roommate, he had a smart phone, right?”

I nodded, “Yeah. He's under forty years old.”

“Do you know if he has one of the apps that tracks where he is?”  
“Yeah. He got lost out on Staten Island one time, so he downloaded it so I could tell him what bus to take.”

“He got lost on Staten Island?” Ronaldo asked, talking a pause from his Cheetos.

“Yeah. It was kind of weird, since it was the same time I went out to find Karim at his parents' house. He was even in the same neighborhood,” I said.

“What was he doing on Staten Island, if he's a student? It's not like there's an NYU campus on Staten Island,” Ronaldo said, standing up, leaving the Cheetos on the table, next to the iPod and wallet.

“You smell something, Scoobie?” Pipita asked, smiling.

“Shut up, fatass. I'm coming up with something,” Ronaldo started tapping his fingers on the table, expectantly. Then he spoke to me, “What case were you two idiots working on when I ran into you in Jersey?”

“Karim had to photograph some guy who was cheating on his boyfriend.”

“That sounds really familiar. Like that's what those other detectives had,” Ronaldo said, “Does your roommate have a tattoo on his hand? Of an eye?”

“Yeah.”

“Well fuck me,” Ronaldo swore loudly, “Turn on that dumb GPS app that Fat Ass was talking about.”

I fumbled for my phone, asking, “What about Luka? How does he fit into this? Karim's phone was in his apartment.”

“I don't get any of this,” Ronaldo stated, checking his watch while I checked my phone.

“What's it say?” Pipita asked.

“Oscar's phone is in Jersey. In the Pine Barrens.”

“Well, that resolves it, he's either dead or murdering someone,” Ronaldo said, “One of you three has a car, right?”


	14. I Ran Like a Cheetah with the Mind of an Assassin

 I had never been kidnapped before, so it was an entirely new experience for me. Given the fact that I was twenty-four years old, it was a pretty good run of getting held hostage or being kidnapped. Granted, there had to be loads of people who were older than me who hadn't gotten kidnapped yet or even possibly not getting kidnapped during the course of their entire lives; I personally determined those people to be overachievers. I supposed that, as one of nine children, at least one of my siblings was statistically bound to that fate. If it had to be one of us, I wasn't really surprised that it was me. It was always going to be. Or Sabri, at least. Or I could have been full of shit, since I knew next to nothing about contemporary crime statistics.

After I went to 1 Police Plaza to see if the detectives were in so I could talk to someone about Steven Gerrard, I got a call from Raphaël's roommate, Oscar. Oscar said that Raphaël was in trouble, so I wasted absolutely no time in attempting to get to Williamsburg. While I was making my way to the Subway, I texted Samir, telling him that I was going to get back to Marcelo's apartment late, which was where I left him to feed Marcelo and Pepe.

I went into Raphaël's building without calling Oscar to let him know that I had gotten there. I was still listening to the newest Mac Miller mix tape, when I went into the stairwell to head up. I was on the landing, when I first noticed the two guys coming down the stairs from Raphaël's floor. I looked up; it was some skinny kid and Juan Mata, who had given me his business card the day before. They were apparently startled by my presence, since they stopped short, two steps above the landing, with the kid nearly tripping down the stairs.

“Karim Benzema!” Juan Mata smiled warmly, too warmly for the lack of relationship that we shared. Or maybe I was too cynical about people being polite. One time I had a slice of pizza thrown at me because I had stopped short in front of some guy while he was eating, because I realized that I missed the store where I was supposed to get a box of blueberry-flavored condoms for one of Gonzalo's birthday parties; it wasn't a swingers' party. Gonzalo just had weird birthday parties.

“You're going to help us find Raphaël, right?” the kid asked, presumably Oscar. He was probably about the same age as Raphaël, I guess. I yanked out my iPod and dropped it in the potted plant on the landing in my rush to do so. I kneeled down to pull it out.

“Yeah, totally,” I said, only feeling leaves and whatever in the plant pot, “When was the last time you saw him? Yesterday? Where'd you see him?”

“The last time I saw him in the alley outside.”

“Cool,” I felt around lamely in the potted plant.

“Maybe you should go look outside,” Oscar suggested.

I glanced back at Oscar, who looked down at me a little confused, “Have you tried calling Raphaël? Or texting him or whatever? Or tweeting him about politics? Is the PATRIOT Act still a big deal? Tweet at him about that.”

“I think you should go look outside now,” Juan Mata said politely.

“I think I'm going to try calling him first, if you don't mind,” I offered.

“You really have to come outside with us,” Juan Mata said, lifting up his suit jacket, enough to show that he had a gun in a holster on his belt. Well fuck. I was going to die. I shoved my wallet and cell phone into the plant's pot, in a snap decision, believing that just perhaps Raphaël would notice my cell phone, wallet, and iPod all in a potted plant in his building and realize something was wrong. I was under pressure and figured I'd take what I could get in alerting someone that I was going to get murdered by someone with the perfect balance of facial hair with his kid sidekick, who looked like he was still in the tenth grade.

As they led me downstairs, I realized that my iPod probably went on random mode when it fell into the potted plant. I hoped it cycled through Atmosphere and Wu Tang Clan, exclusively, and completely avoiding the _Victorious_ season one soundtrack that Sabri had sent me as a joke, but I kind of liked it, so I hadn't deleted it yet. If I was going to die, I'd at least hope that everyone thought I was thoughtful and had good taste in music.

Two guys were waiting outside for the three of us, sitting on the trunk of a beat up gray Volkswagen Jetta. I had to sit in the middle seat of the back bench, even though both Juana Mata and Oscar were significantly shorter than me. Juan Mata was so short, he probably had to sit in the middle seat all of the time. But I guess they didn't want me to open the car door while they were driving and hurl myself out onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the way to wherever they were planning to bury my body.

It was quite tense in the car, as one would expect a kidnapping-in-progress to be. Well, I was very tense. Juan Mata, Oscar, and the two other guys seemed like it was standard operating precedure for them. Juan Mata asked, still very politely, even though he had implied that he would shoot me, “So Karim, what do you think about the Yankees season so far?”

He was going to be the one to kill me. I could tell. Far too polite for anyone who had spent any significant amount of time in New York. Weirdly inquisitive about baseball at inappropriate times. He was like the Zodiac Killer in a nice suit.

“I've completely forgotten everything that I ever knew about the Yankees.”

The space in my brain where I usually stored vital information about New York/New Jersey-based sports teams, music and the locations of my favorite halal stands had been wiped clean. I couldn't remember how many siblings I had and what their names were. Other important facts that I completely forgotten included my address, where I went to college and high school, and when my birthday was. It was probably the first time in my life that I had been in actual, factual danger, so I'm pretty sure my brain just shut down in order to preserve its faculties for when more immediate danger imposed itself.

“Well, Karim, this is Oscar,” Juan Mata said, pointing at the kid, sitting next me; he was looking out the window. I had figured as much, so I nodded.

“That's Petr, driving and also joining us is Eden.”

Petr was driving on the Verrazano Bridge before too long and I saw my home borough from the back seat of the getaway car. It was all from I-278, so I didn't actually see any of the sights that I was used to or wanted to see, but I was it was “nice” of them to let me see home before they left me for dead in the middle of no where in Pennsylvania. I mentally waved good bye to my mom, my dad, my brothers, my sisters, and our cats.

An hour and forty-five minutes later, we were in the Pine Barrens. We were in some real isolated part of the woods, with some crumbly old, stone building. It was the only structure I'd seen in miles. Oscar pulled on my arm, to lead me into the building. Eden and Petr walked behind us, probably to make sure that I didn't make a break for it.

I thought about all of the things I hadn't done in my life. I had never met Jay-Z or had gone to a game at the new Yankees Stadium or ate a Cool Ranch Doritos Loco Taco. I would never know who killed Biggie. And I had never been ice skating at either Central Park, Bryant Park, or Rockefeller Center.

The last time I had spoken to my sister, it was so that I could “borrow” her New York State Park parking permit so I could go to Jones Beach without having to split parking with Samir. I had left one of my best friends in the world in the company of hungry drug dealing stoners. I drank alcohol. I had premarital sex and loved money way too much. I once ate a Baconator knowingly and didn't feel bad afterwards. I was majorly going to Hell.

I decided that God might like to know that I was sorry for all of those things. Maybe if I had known I was going to die at twenty-four, I wouldn't've packed all that sinning into such a short expanse of time. I tried apologizing, but I wouldn't know if it worked for quite a while, I supposed.

We went inside the building. It was probably condemned at one point and was very likely used for group sex in the 1970s, but that didn't stop the guys from going in. It was very primitive; there weren't any electric fittings that I noticed. There was a battery powered lantern on top of a card table that Oscar and I passed. It was still and creepy. There were spaces between the floorboards from the house settling. Oscar led me to a door and opened it so I would go in before him, but I saw that it was a door to a basement, with the stairs going down. He shut the door behind me.

“Hello?” I called out, “Is there anybody there?”  
I crouched down and I felt the wall, trying to make sure that I didn't fall all the way down the stairs.

“Where's there?” a distinct Boston accent demanded.

“Karim Benzema. Who are you?” I asked, shuffling around in the darkness. There was some light falling through the gaps in the floor above, but it wasn't really enough to really see anything other than vague forms.

“Steven Gerrard.”

“Steven Gerrard? Holy shit! I've been looking for you! Xabi Alonso hired me to find you!”

“You've seen Xabi?” his voice became desperate, “How is he? Is he okay?”

“I saw him on Friday,” I replied, remembering that Xabi seemed quite sharkish, so I assumed he was fine. He kept calling me “Melonhead,” which I didn't really appreciate. I continued, “He's really worried about you.”

I shuffled towards Steven Gerrard's voice, as he said, "He hired a private detective just for me?  Have you heard about the others? "

“Yeah. They ended up in the trunks of stolen cars in Manhattan,” I felt Steven Gerrard, all fleshy and warm, still, “You know, man, I don't like my chances.  I might be on the case they were working on, too.”

“So, Xabi hired you and you're not here to rescue me?”

“I'm really not that great at this profession. I'm trying to go back to college.”

“You're a real fucking help, huh?”

“Hey, it's not my fucking fault you got yourself here in the first place,” I said, letting go of his arms, “Yeah, while you've been playing solo _Breakfast Club_ , the Red Sox went 0 for 14.”

Steven Gerrard grabbed my hand and pulled me into the darker reaches of the basement. He said loudly, his accent becoming more forcefully conversational, “You must think you're real funny, huh? The Sox would never play like that you animal.”

He whispered, “We'll talk later tonight.”

When we were in the darkest corner of the basement, Steven Gerrard lifted something up and a small sliver of light poked underneath the bottom of the foundation. He whispered, “Me and Ruud pried up some of the floor and made a lot of progress.”

I didn't say anything. I hadn't really thought about digging out of a house before. Well, I never needed to escape from anywhere before. Except for jail, but the point of jail was to make it really hard to escape from there.

We sat around in the basement for a while, hearing the men upstairs shuffle around and talk. Around seven o'clock, Oscar gave me a jumbo jar of olives and locked the basement door behind him.

I tipped the jar so the olives would flow into my mouth. Steven Gerrard shoved his hand into the jar and scooped out a handful. I gave him the rest of the jar. There was a bathroom in the basement; it was mostly dark in there, but at least there wasn't a communal waste bucket or something like that. I probably would have had to just curl up and die, if that were the case. Steven told me that they let him outside sometimes so he wouldn't develop rickets or something. I fell asleep on the dirty wood floor slats at around eleven-thirty, mildly tortured by knowing how my family probably reacted to the news or eventual realization that I was missing or dead. Except they would just to have to figure that out, I had a long day, all things considered.

At two-thirty in the morning, Steven shook me awake, “I think they're asleep.”

We used the jar and one of my shoes to dig the hole in the floor deeper.

“You know, I'm trying to get us out. I don't want you to die like the others,” Steven said, “Ruud and I tried, but we couldn't finish this quickly enough.”

“Why are they killing the private detectives but not you?”

“I'm a higher valued target than you guys. I'm in the business, you know.”

I said, “They think I figured out that they're targetting Sergio Ramos on purpose, don't they?”

“You didn't?”

“Complete accident. I think they hired me to follow Sergio Ramos because they thought I was really stupid.”

“They didn't want you to dig into why they were having you photograph him. That's what Ruud and David did,” Steven whispered, “You know why they hired you? Did you figure it out?”

I shook my head. All I got was that they hired me for a weird reason and because they thought I was an idiot.

“Using honeypots is kind of one of the unspoken common recruitment methods. Frank Lampard and John Terry have been trying to recruit Ramos for years. Everyone has been. Anfield even tried a few years ago, when Torres worked for us. Torres defected and is still trying to recruit Ramos.”

“So how do I fit into this?”

“There's another company that's been really serious about trying to honeypot Ramos to get him on their side,” Steven said, “And Lampard's desperate to figure out who that is. If he had photographs, he could figure out who it is. We all know each other enough that we can't get close enough to get away with it.”

“The company's from Germany, I think. They had German accents.”

“You didn't do any digging?” he asked, like he didn't believe me.

“Not intentionally. Once Torres wrote that check, I thought I was never going to see them again. But I kept running into them.”

Steven dumped out the jarful of dirt that we had accumulated. Steven's head could fit out of the hole we widened, but that was it. We had to dig deeper and wider, but by five, I was falling asleep again

Steven Gerrard kicked my foot to wake me up. I had used my suit jacket as a makeshift pillow. Looking down at my clothes, it was very obvious that I needed a new suit.

“Do you know if Raphaël Varane is involved with this?” I asked, “He's my friend, but he's roommates with Oscar. The one who looks like he's six. And I was wondering if he's been around here and knew all about this stuff?”

“What does he look like?”

“Real tall. Like six foot five or something--”

I was about to describe him further when Steven said, “I don't think I've seen anyone around that tall other than Petr.”

He was quiet for a little bit before asking, “Is Xabi okay? He's not like stressing out too much, right?”

“You're missing and you think he wasn't stressing too much?”

“I'm hoping. I can take care of myself.”

“Well, he was worried enough about you to hire me.”

“I get that, but I don't want him to worry. He's got a stressful job. He's going to get an aneurysm from it,” Steven said, all wistfully, like he was going to say _you'll understand when you love someone._ I already knew about people who worried about me unneccessarily, even if they were my parents.

“If you didn't want him to worry, you shouldn't have gotten kidnapped,” I snapped.

It was quite boring in the basement, since Steven didn't want the guys upstairs to eavesdrop on whatever Steven planned to tell me. I crawled around the basement, trying to find something to do. I found an old plunger in the bathroom, but I wasn't sure how to apply that tool to the situation I was in. If I was actually lost in the wilderness or something, I'd have probably been eaten by bears already.

One time, Gonzalo's parents took him, his brothers, and me camping at Montauk. Gonzalo and I went hiking in flip flops and trucker hats. I got blisters so big that we had to wait until one Gonzalo's brothers could carry me down. If we weren't on Long Island, where most predators had been driven extinct by human settlement, we probably would have been more worried about becoming prey for a bear or an eccentric millionaire's escaped pet lion. And to make matters worse, I had the worst sunburn of my life, possibly the worst sunburn that any Arab had ever suffered from.

At noon, Oscar gave me an industrial sized jar of pickles and let us out of the basement. I stuck my fingers into the pickle brine and cringed as I ate them; my dirty, dusty fingers were handling my food and it was really bothering me, but I was really hungry.

“Hand 'em over, you dumb fuck,” Steven said, reaching out to take the pickles from me. I gave him the jar and looked out the cracks in the boarded up windows, like a prisoner who had been in solitary confinement, trying to see the Sun for the first time in six months.

Juan Mata approached me, asking, far too politely for the situation, “So Karim, tell us about yourself.”

I had a half-baked plan already brewing in my brain and once given the opportunity, I couldn't stop myself from blurting out any random shit that my tongue saw fit to speak, “I'm from France and I'm with Interpol.”

My accent went very Pepe Le Pew. Juan Mata smiled as though I hadn't started speaking like a racist English person's version of what a French accent actually sounded like, while the others looked confused. Steven continued eating pickles, like nothing happened at all.

“Really? Who's the president of France?” Juan Mata asked.

“Like I know that. I haven't been in France in two months,” I replied. The joke was him. I didn't even know who the American president was and I lived in America for the past twenty years. I guessed though, “Is Thuram still important?”

“What?” Juan Mata and the others didn't seem to register that reaction.

“You know how French people are. We light cars on fire when we're mildly angry. We probably ousted the last guy already,” I based my view of French society on my father's reactions to when the the cable company changes the channel numbers, raise rates, or, God forbid, remove or add channels. He almost put his foot through the television when he thought they removed the Food Network from the channel package and spent the better part of four hours on the phone yelling at people from the cable company, swearing at them in Arabic from visible frustration.

“What's the French national anthem?”

“La Marseillaise, duh. You think I wouldn't know my own national anthem?” I replied. I only knew the Marseillaise, which Juan Mata asked me to sing, because I lied about not knowing French in middle school, so I could take it for my language credit to get an easy A. We learned the Marseillaise as part of a project, which I aced, due to my already learned skill. I got caught out during my entrance tests for high school and they eventually stuck me in Italian, where I met Gonzalo.

“Why are you in the United States?” Juan Mata asked evenly, as though he believed me or had the potential to at some point believe me.

“You think that someone could possibly be as bad as those Yelp reviews claimed and still be in business? Do you even understand capitalism?” I said. Juan Mata, Oscar, Eden, and Petr all nodded, as if that made sense. They were more willing to believe that I was some weird supergenius in an international police organization over the more likely possibility that I was, in fact, a lucky idiot.

"I'm supposed to be after you guys.  I'm supposed to be looking into the whole contracting situation in New York.  Especially since Anfield International was involved in this."

Juan Mata told us to go back downstairs. Steven brought the pickles with him.

“I didn't know you were with Interpol, you moron,” Steven whispered, “Was that after you graduated from middle school? Or were you always a busy boy?”

“I was trying to come up with reason for them not to kill me? I'm not dying before my twenty-fifth birthday, okay?”

“So you came up with the dumbest plan that anyone could have come up with? I think there are talking dogs with better ideas than that.”

I shrugged. We started scraping away at the dirt underneath the floorboard, since we were trying to escape with more of a concerted effort, especially since it was obvious that I was not actually a French Interpol agent.

Above us, there was a commotion. Running, heavy footsteps, and doors slamming. My first immediate thought was that they were leaving forever and I was going to starve to death in a basement, with a guy who thought that the Boston Red Sox were an acceptable team. I was probably going to starve first, since I was a weak-willed person who had never really to worry about survival before and because Steven ate more pickles and olives than I did. Steven Gerrard would have to eat me. Then, my parents would have to live with the thought of a cannibal eating my dead body.

I ran up the stairs to the door. Rather, I crawled to the top of the stairs as quickly as I could.

“What are you doing?”

“I refuse to die here!”

When I got to the top of the stairs, I decided that I had a reasonable amount of strength and could kick the door down. Instead, the door was actually kind of flimsy, hollow, and old, so my foot went staight through the door. My leg was caught up in the door up to my thigh.

Steven shouted up from down the stairs, “What is going on?”

“Nothing!”

I pulled on the bannister on the opposite wall to free myself. After I got my leg out of the door, I tried to look through the hole to see something useful. I didn't, so I tried reaching my hand to the doorknob. An unknown hand grabbed my hand while it searched for a key or a lock. I pulled my hand in and Juan Mata glared at me through the hole in the door.

“Karim, let me open the door.”

I moved to the stairs and Juan Mata opened the door in towards me, which ultimately explained why I couldn't kick the door open.

He pushed someone into the basement and shut the door.

“What happened up there?” Steven shouted.

“You are Raphaël's friend, yes?” the other guy said, in a much deeper voice than I was expected, especially since he was about four foot tall. I recognized Luka the Squirrel, though our interaction hadn't been very extensive anyway.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, feeling the wall going further downstairs. Luka followed me.

“I found a cell phone in the potted plant in my building. I knew something odd was happening in that building, so I decided to play Sherlock,” Luka the Squirrel sneered at me, “I thought I'd find something a little more exotic than you.”

“Yeah, well fuck you. I'm with Interpol and Steven's with Anfield International,” I replied, probably far too harshly.

“If you think I'm going to believe that you're with Interpol, you're insane,” Luka the Squirrel said, “You didn't know what that stupid flashdrive was for.”

“What flash drive?” Steven asked, finally intervening into our conversation.

“He stole some Anfield flashdrive. I'm sure you miss it,” Luka the Squirrel said.

Steven shoved my shoulder, “You have the fucking flashdrive! You fucking moron! Where is it? I hope you didn't throw it into the Hudson River or nothing.”

“I have it taken care of.”

“Do you? Because the last time you had something taken care of, you told Juan Mata that you were in Interpol,” Steven hissed, “Where'd you leave it? Under your pillow?”

“I have a plan. Kind of,” I said.

“That makes me feel so much better,” Steven replied, shuffling off to continue scraping away at his tunnel to freedom.  Luka the Squirrel followed him, probably because he, too, thought that I was just going to get murdered during an ill-fated escape attempt.


	15. Cash Rules Everything Around Me

 The next day was a Tuesday, I was pretty sure. My internal timeline kind of screwed up because I hadn't seen a calendar since I had been kidnapped, on a day that I believed to be Sunday. On Monday, I told a group of men, who had no qualms killing people, that I was with Interpol. And I only chose Interpol because I forgot the name of the French military contracting company that Raphaël told me about and I thought it would be really suspicious if I didn't know what their name was if I claimed to work for them.

The hole in the floor was actually getting quite wide. We almost had a hole deep enough to shove Luka out. It was good that Luka was quite small since Steven and I were about the same size.

The house was built into a hill, so one side of the basement was up against dirt and rocks, while the other side faced a small valley tucked in the Pine Barrens. The entire exposed half of the basement was the side where Steven and Ruud had begun digging. It was creepy still at night, while we were digging. For most of my life, I never really had to just listen to pure nature. I mean, I wasn't sleeping amongst a constant barrage of car horns and car alarms or anything, but I never heard so many bugs or birds and so few people-related noises. The second night, while Steven and Luka snored not too far away, I couldn't sleep. It was just too quiet. I almost wished I hadn't left my iPod in the potted plant.

Oscar brought us a large jar of peanut butter. As he handed it to me, I asked, “How are we supposed to eat this? We're not savages, you know.”

Steven took it out of my hand anyway and twisted open the top. Oscar handed Luka a newspaper. Although my stomach rumbled with hunger, I was not going to get an infection from sticking dirty fingers into peanut butter. Luka and Steven could die of sepsis all they liked. I told them as much. Steven replied, “You know a lot about diseases that can kill you, but you didn't know who the president of France is.”

I shrugged. Diagnosing myself with Ebola or whatever those people had on _Awakenings_ was kind of a hobby of mine. I had to spend my hours of my usually boring life doing something and usually, it was deluding myself into believing that I was on the edge of tragic, oozing death. It was probably a habit picked up from my mother, who usually assumed someone was dead if they didn't pick up their phone or return calls within two hours. Even though I didn't like to admit it, I was quite like my parents.

Luka shouted from across the basement; he was reading the newspaper, “You are Karim Benzema, yes?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Luka stood up to hand me the newspaper that Oscar had given him before, “Looks like you're famous, man.”

> THIRD PRIVATE DETECTIVE GOES MISSING
> 
> NEW YORK—Karim Benzema, 24, of Staten Island is the third private detective in a month and a half to be reported missing. Benzema, a former student at Columbia University, has no previous known associations with David Villa or Ruud van Nistelrooy, the other two private detectives who were later found murdered.
> 
> NYPD spokesman, Álvaro Arbeloa, has stated that a taskforce has been formed in order to investigate Benzema's disappearancee, but has not publicly stated whether he or the NYPD believes that the disappearances are related. No suspects have been publicly named.
> 
> If the public has any tips, the NYPD is requesting information through both Twitter and their tip hotline.

I wasn't even on the front page. Or in the first five pages. I was on a small corner on page A-7. They even had my high school graduation picture, since my mother was clearly in charge of sending in photographs. She thought that my graduation picture was the best picture that anyone had ever taken of me, even though it had been taken seven years prior.

“This is why no one's going to believe that you're with Interpol. You don't see my picture in the fucking New York Post or some shit.”

“No one reported you missing. I talked to a clerk at police headquarters on Sunday, but none of the detectives were working,” I replied, “The newspaper isn't going to report on something that is a non-issue to the police.”

We spent most of the day doing the crossword puzzles, huddled underneath the shards of light that poked through the floorboards above us. In the evening, they let us upstairs.

“Do you have anymore funny stories for us, Karim?” Juan Mata asked, still smiling. Petr, Eden, and Oscar were playing poker. Eden was smoking a cigarette. I was hit upside the head with an intense craving, just watching him. Since becoming a hostage, I believed that I was coping pretty well. I was just getting bitchier and bitchier as I consumed less food and got less sleep. And considering I was worried about my mortality and my family, in a general way, I thought was doing very well.

I shrugged, washing my hands in the kitchen sink. Juan Mata said, “We found you on Facebook. You've either been in Interpol since you lived in France, when you were a child. Or you're lying. Which one is it?”

“Take a guess. You seem smart.”

“Why do you think we should keep you around?”

“Because you know that I know where that stupid flashdrive is. And you kill me, you'll never know where it is,” I replied. I figured that I might as well go for a Hail Mary. If I had to, I was willing to make up locations of dozens of flashdrives all around New York to give me some extra time to potentially escape.

“What stupid flashdrive?” Juan Mata squinted at me.

“The one I stole from Steven Gerrard's church, duh,” I replied, but Juan Mata only gave me a blank stare, “Come on, you guys broke into my apartment twice looking for it. You went through our pancake mix. Like I would hide something there.”

Juan Mata still looked at me blankly. Luka spoke up from the corner of the room, where he had been conspiring with Steven, “That was Bernabéu who did that. I told them that you had the flashdrive.”

“What the fuck? I thought you were on my side,” I demanded.

“Well, we only looked for it once. The other time must have been Anfield.”

Well, the truth certainly came out at awkward times, didn't it? I continued, “Well, I have a flashdrive. That I'm totally willing to give to you, if you let me go.”

“Do you know what you're handing out?” Steven asked, now standing up from his corner, “That's the intellectual property of Anfield International.”

“Fine, fight it out in court, after I'm back home. The thing is, I'm not up for getting killed over something I really don't care about. I won't tell anyone that this ever happened. I'll tell everyone that I got lost and ended up wandering around in Central Park for three days and they'll believe me. I really didn't even mean to find out about Torres being connected with you guys or any of that,” I replied. Juan Mata glanced at Petr, Eden, and Oscar, who looked up from their game.

Juan Mata said slowly, “It's not about you not saying anything now. It's you not saying anything for the rest of your life.”

“I won't say anything. I promise, I'll forget this ever happened. Leave me on the Jersey Turnpike and I'll hitchhike my way home and say that I was in a psychogenic fugue.”

“A psychogenic what?”

“It's a psychological thing where you just don't know what the fuck you were doing for a couple of days. Like if you're blacked out or something,” I replied, “I've seen it used as a plot device on _Law and Order_ a few times.”

Petr said to Juan Mata, “We should probably call the boss about the flashdrive.”

And we were forced back into the basement again. Luka and Steven started gossiping about contracting stuff, so I felt like the one business major living amongst liberal arts students again.

“What do you think Roman's going to do to Benzema?” Steven whispered loudly, as if he thought I wouldn't hear him.

“He's the governor, now. He can't kill Benzema himself.”

“Wait a fucking second, Roman Abramovich is in charge of this?” I only knew who he was because he allegedly thought about buying the Mets, which made Gonzalo really happy because it meant that they might have a chance of making post-season, if they had an owner who cared about that kind of thing.

“He owns Stamford Bridge,” Steven replied, “But he's got a new managing director. It used to be Rafa Benítez, but he got fired. Even after he got them to expand to New York.”

“Who's the new director?”

“No one knows officially yet.”

“Ramos told me that Mourinho dropped us and is going to Stamford Bridge.”

“The Mayor of New York is a managing director of a contracting company?”

Luka sighed loudly, “You didn't have a problem with your governor being a multi-millionaire who owns a company.”

“I thought the Mayor wouldn't have another job on top of being the Mayor.”

Luka shrugged and said, “Whatever. It's not like he's the President.”

“Is the President involved in this kind of stuff, too?” I asked.

“Bocanegra?” Steven asked, shaking his head, sighing, “Our dreamiest president? If that were true, I would have to burn my shrine to him.”

All three of us went back to digging our hole with a new vigor, me in particular, just in case my threats went unheeded and Roman Abramovich decided that I was worthy of death. The floorboards above us creaked, as usual, since the house was falling apart around us. I could hear Petr, Eden, Oscar, and Juan all talking, pacing around above us. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but it was something vaguely important.

Luka could slip out fully, but he was a lot smaller than Steven and me, so we still had to dig deeper. The floorboards creaked really loudly, groaning under someone's weight. We were almost there, with our frantic digging.

There was a great crack overhead. The floorboards split and more light poured down into the basement. Unfortunately though, one of the four Stamford Bridge guys was dangling in the hole he had created. And he dropped his iPhone, which I picked up. Steven shoved me from behind. Luka had already slipped out of the hole we had dug. I was next. It was a tight fit, but Luka grabbed my ankles and pulled, while Steven pushed my shoulders with his feet. When I popped out, we pulled on Steven's legs until he slid out. As we tugged on Steven's legs, we heard the front door of the building open and slam shut.

“We should split up,” Luka said, while already four yards away, disappearing into the woods. Steven sprinted in the opposite direction from Luka, while I ran towards the road, around the back of the house. I wasn't a survivalist; if I got lost in the woods, I was not going to live long before I was eaten by a wolf or whatever lived in the Pine Barrens. I probably would be spirited away by the Jersey Devil, considering my luck.

I didn't hear anyone running after me: no shoes crunching on the pebbled road, no huffing breaths or anything. I slowed down. Maybe they thought no one was stupid enough to run along the road. Well, I had to think: there was four of them. One of them was possibly still stuck in the hole between the basement and the first floor. That left three of them to run after us, but possibly two, if one guy stayed behind to help the one who had fallen through the floorboards. Luka and Steven were in the woods, while I was along the road. There wouldn't be any tracks to follow along the road, since it wasn't out of the ordinary for people to walk on a road, while they could find a trail in the woods for Luka and Steven. The sun was setting, so hope for finding their trails in the woods was probably slipping away every minute.

I took the time to look at the iPhone that I nabbed before our mighty escape. It was still in one piece, with no shattering of the screen, even despite the fact it fell an entire story to the ground. Perhaps the thin layer of dirt and disturbed dust protected it.

I decided it would be appropriate to call the police. All things considered, I probably should have called the police.

“Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?”

“Hi. I'm in the Pine Barrens and I'm lost, but that's not really why I'm calling.”

“Excuse me.”

“I got kidnapped a few days ago and I've escaped. So have the two guys I got kidnapped with.”

“Sir, what's your name?”

“Karim Benzema. I'd really just like to go home. You don't have to arrest anyone immediately. If you guys could find me first and worry about them later, I'd appreciate that.”

“Mr. Benzema, do you know where you are in the Pine Barrens?”

“Not really. I was just in some old house for three days and I'm not from around here.”

“Sir, I want to help you, but if we don't know where you are, we cannot find you quickly.”

“Listen, up until Sunday, I've really only thought about the Pine Barrens from when I saw that one _Sopranos_ episodes with the Russian guy they couldn't kill.”

To be completely honest, most of my life experiences came from movies and television shows, so my ignorance about the Pine Barrens was to be expected.

“Excuse me, sir, that's not really pertinant to our ability to find you. Can you describe where you are?”

“I'm on a road. It's made of pebbles, I think. The house we were in looked like it was condemned at one point. Maybe it was one of those places where people in the 1970s got together to have drug-fueled group sex. It looked like it.”

“Do you know what the road is called?”

“No.”

“Is it okay if we continue talking while you find out what road you're on.”

“I have to call my parents, if you don't mind. Can I call back if I figure anything else out?”

There was a long silence, since I think the operator was taken aback, “I'm going to send out some officers to the Pine Barrens to talk to the rangers out there about the building you described.”

I hung up and dialed my parents' phone number, as I continued walking along the road. Sabri picked up, “Hello?”

I didn't know what to say. He knew who I was and I knew who he was. Once I said something, he'd know I was alive. And it was very nice to hear from him, especially since I thought, for a good day and a half that I'd never speak to my brother, or any of my siblings or friends or parents, again.

“Hello?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Who is this?” Sabri's voice turned sharp.

“Karim. It's Karim.”

“Where are you? Are you okay?”

“I'm in Jersey. I'm fine. Right now, I'm fine,” I said, continuing to walk alongside the dark road. I didn't want to walk into the middle of the road, so I wouldn't get hit by a car or anything, but I did want to make sure that I saw any cars that passed by.

“Where were you? Are you like, with the police or anything?”

“I'm kind of on the lam right now, but I figured I'd make peace with you guys before I ended up in the trunk of some guys' car.”

“What the fuck? You're too busy talking. Maybe you should be escaping.”

“Hey. I've been held hostage for the past three days and I haven't eaten anything that hasn't been pickled in three days either. Let me talk to Mom or Dad.”

“Did you know the CIA is trying find you too?”

“What? Why?”

“I don't know. It's like we live in a spy movie. Or like when you came home from Algeria and you said that you thought that a blue Ford Focus was following you all over the City.”

“I hadn't been paying attention to the license plates. Sue me.”

“But I'm not lying. Pipita said that they even got some major league detective from the NYPD knocked off your case.”

I could hear someone shouting in the background. Sabri said, “Cool it, Dad! I'm on the phone...Yeah, it's Karim.”

My dad's voice came over the line. Even though I usually associated his voice with his complaints about everything from soccer to the Food Network declining in quality, I became very overcome with emotion. My dad said, “Karim? Is that really you?”

I almost started crying right away, “I'm sorry! I'm sorry for everything.”

It was kind of amazing how easily Sabri got my hackles up and how easily hearing my dad's voice broke down my wall of emotion.

“What are you sorry about?”

“I'm sorry about getting arrested and dropping out of school. I'm sorry that I've messed up in every conceivable way. I'm sorry I got kidnapped too. And that the CIA is now wiretapping us. That's all my fault, I'm pretty sure. I'm also the one that broke Grandma's vase that she smuggled out of Algeria. I told you the cats did it because I was afraid of getting in trouble!”

My dad didn't say anything. I almost preferred sniping at Sabri. He asked, “Where are you? Have you called the police?”

“Yeah. I called the police, but there's not much I could tell them, since I'm in the Pine Barrens just walking around.”

“You're safe, though?”

“For now, I guess,” I replied. Car headlights were thrown upon the road from behind me. I looked behind me. I couldn't really see. I wasn't sure if I should hide or not, considering Petr, Oscar, Eden, and Juan Mata all having a car and possibly Luka's car, as well. But there could be plenty of tourists leaving the Pine Barrens, going back north.

“If you're in New Jersey, you should go to your sister's house.”

“She lives in Patterson, Dad. I'm not hiking a hundred miles. I'll find a police officer before then.”

The car pulled to a stop next to me. It was a dark colored sedan, but I couldn't determine what color it was, in the pitch black night. The rear passenger side window rolled down. It was Mayor Jose Mourinho. My luck in a nutshell. I almost dropped my stolen cell phone. I heard my father's muffled voice shout “Karim!” from the little speaker.

“Are you lost?” he asked, like he didn't know that I was escaping his underlings' bunker. Like I hadn't stolen someone's cell phone that for all I knew could have been a company cell phone, meaning that he could have a tracking device in it. Of course, all of my rational thought returned when I was on the verge of getting murdered, without any recourse.

For reasons, unknown to even me, I lapsed into a confused Arab routine, complete with confused Arab accent, “Yes. I cannot find the highway.”

“It looks like you've been lost for a while.”

“I fall down a hill,” I said, losing both a grasp of verb conjugation and a passable accent, “I get confused.”

Mayor Mourinho seemed non-plussed, “Would you like a ride?”

“No. I call the rangers already. It is okay. They want me to stay right here.”

He shrugged, “If I see the rangers, I'll let them know you're waiting for them.”

He rolled up the rear passenger side window and the car sped away. I stood in that position for almost an entire minute, trying to compute what exactly happened.

The call with my dad had ended when I checked the phone; he probably hung up and called the police or something. I dropped the phone and ran into the woods, into the underbrush.

It was kind of funny. I had waited nearly my whole life to be involved in something that was actually exciting, but once placed in that situation, I found it to be miserable, awful, and terrifying. Being involved in a conspiracy where the Mayor of New York City and the Governor of New York State wanted to snuff me out, or use me to get at a stupid flashdrive that I had left in a faux potted plant in a Macaroni Hut was not as fun as it would sound to me, just a month before. Spies, military contractors, governmental abuse of resources, the CIA. It all sounded like a good romp, but it was really stressful.

I walked through the woods slowly. I didn't want to run into a tree or trip over a vine or something and twist my ankle. I'd seen enough horror movies to know that the woods were bad news, especially for someone who was running for his life. I was probably going to get stolen by forest people and have to be part of their clan until I used a magnifying glass to create fire for them, astounding them with my futuristic ways. Except I didn't have a magnifying glass, or matches, or a lighter. In reality, I'd probably have to be a part of their clan until they fattened me up to an adequate weight so I could be their food source for a winter or so.

There were twigs snapping nearby and it wasn't me. I stayed completely still, holding my breath.

“Hello?” a voice called out, “Who's there?”

I let my breath. It was Steven. I would recognize his stupid accent anywhere in the forests of New Jersey.

“Steven?” I said, creeping forward gingerly, “Are you okay?”

“I haven't seen Luka since we all split up,” he said, “I thought for sure, you'd be the dead one.”

He grabbed my arm in the dark, “Where'd you go?”

“I went on the road. And I called the police.”

“How the fuck did you call the police? Did you find a phone plugged into a tree?”

“I took that guy's phone. The one who fell through the floor.”

“So the police should be coming through here?”

“Well, I don't know where we are. And the operator seemed to think that was an important aspect of finding us. Then, I dropped the phone because I ran into Mayor Mourinho. And now I'm here.”

“You walked along the road the entire time?”

“Yeah. Except just now. Since I'm in the woods.”

“Well, let's go back to that house. And maybe we'll find Luka and we'll get out of here.”

“Is that what's going to happen? Or what you hope will happen? Or what you're telling me so I don't have a nervous breakdown in the woods?”

“The last two.”

“Well fuck. I'm really going to die tonight, aren't I?”

“Calm down.”

“Calm down? I confessed my darkest secrets to my father because I thought I would get forgiveness tomorrow! Now I'm going to die and I'm going to Hell and everyone's going to know I broke that goddamn vase.”

“You are overreacting.”

“I'm overreacting? There are two open homicide cases in New York because of these guys. I refuse to believe I am overreacting.”

“Well, it is very hard to drag you through the fucking forest if you insist upon believing that your death is impending.”

Steven grabbed my arm and we walked back to the road. We couldn't find the iPhone, so we walked back towards the house. Or in the assumed direction of the house.

As we walked along the road, pebbles crunching under our shoes, it was becoming clear how far I fled away or possibly got so lost that we were going to wander the Pines Barrens until we withered away to husks.

Someone came up the road. I could hear more footsteps along the road. I asked, “Luka? Is that you?”

“Take a guess; you seem smart,” Juan Mata said.

Great. I was going to die.


	16. Empire State of Mind

 For all I knew, Juan Mata planned to shoot both Steven and me, leaving our bodies in the road, as warning for Luka, who for all I knew was dead as well. I instinctively crouched and backed up so I would be behind Steven. If he shot at us, hopefully, he'd wound Steven, while I escaped to safety. To say I behaved shamefully throughout the entire ordeal was being kind in describing my behavior.

“I'll tell you where the stupid flashdrive is!” I said, “Just don't shoot me! Us!”

Steven elbowed me, probably not pleased that I appeared to be using him as a human shield. Or possibly he was not pleased that I was planning to give up corporate secrets. Well, you know what? I was not ready to die. Or witness a murder.

“I don't want the fucking flashdrives. You know what I want?” he said, “I want you two idiots to come back with me.”

“If you're going to murder us, can you do it already? I really can't stand this tension!” To be completely honest, I didn't want to die, but I was not emotionally capable of the push and pull of mercy at the hands of murderers.  I knew that Juan Mata wanted to kill me:  he killed David Villa and Ruud van Nistelrooy before me.

Steven elbowed me again. He said, “Listen, Juan. We can all get through this easily. Karim has already promised to make sure that no one will ever know what you guys are worried that he will reveal. He didn't even figure out that Torres was working for you guys on purpose.”

“You found out accidentally?”  
“I didn't even mean to run into Torres after he paid me. I am one of the least curious people you will find,” I replied, “It was all a giant misunderstanding.”

“So you don't know about any of the other things? Like the managing director and who the owner is?”

Shit. I did know that stuff. But only because Steven and Luka couldn't keep their traps shut. I said carefully, “I didn't investigate into that.”

“So you don't know?”

“Nope. Why would I bother, if everything else was a complete mistake?”

Juan Mata considered all of these statements. But he still said, “We're going back to the house.”

Juan Mata came closer. I could hear his shoes crunch on the street's gravel. Steven was pulled away. I followed, “Are you going to kill us?”

“We'll talk to the boss.”

He grabbed my shirt. As we walked back, I asked, “Does anyone mind if I starting talking out loud? If I do die, I'd like to have resolved several things that I probably should have gone to therapy for.”

“What?” Juan Mata said, taken aback by my request.

“Well, you know, I've tried have an emotional epiphany. I called my dad before and I told him that I was the one who broke my grandmother's vase. I can't help but wonder if talking these things through could have actually resolved my emotional problems.”

“You have emotional problems?” Steven asked, “I would have just thought you were socially stunted.”

“I went to Columbia University and I've just gotten kidnapped because I'm a private detective. You do the math. The emotionally healthy do not become private detectives.”

“I don't disagree with that statement,” Steven said. It was like walking around at night with an unpaid therapist that hated me, for a second. Except for the part where our mutual kidnapper was pushing us back towards a structurally unsafe house, where a gang of potential murderers were hanging around. You know, it was almost normal, except for all of the parts where it wasn't.

“I think maybe I have a fear of failure,” I said, “You know, like I've been worried about success for a really long time. Like everyone from high school all went to Ivies or top schools. Except for Pipita. He went to community college.”

“If you're afraid of failure, why are you a failure?”

“Maybe I'm so afraid of being unable to succeed, I set myself up for failure.”

“Is that how people do that now? What'd you do? Start taking drugs or whatever?”

“I got arrested for hiring a prostitute.”

“That's not what I would think of, when I think of people who self-sabotage. I think more of drug addicts,” Steven said, “But I guess, it's entirely possible. I'm no psychologist.”

Juan Mata snorted in disdain. Whatever. He wasn't going to be the one to agonize over my life and my bad choices. In the best case scenario, he'd be in jail, contemplating how he accidentally let me and Steven escape in some highly contrived manner. In the worst case scenario, Juan Mata would get away with killing us and no one would ever find out where we went.

“Listen, Juan,” I asked, deciding to change the subject, “Why did you guys kidnap me when you did? I was barely onto you and I more or less didn't really care beyond telling the cops that I had some suspicions about Steven.”

Steven elbowed me again.

“One of the boss's right hand guys talked to you.”

“The only person I talked to was one of the clerks.”

“Michael Essien, right?”

I thought about it for a second. It had been a Sunday, so no one who didn't have to be there wasn't there, but it wasn't like crime stopped just because it was a weekend.

“Huh. He works for you guys too?” I said; Michael Essien was always nice to me, but he was firmly on the NYPD's side, when it came to my inadequacies as an investigator, which meant that he probably knew about my Yelp page and laughed about it with a number of other clerks or police officers.

“He doesn't work for us exactly. He's just very loyal to our boss.”

I nodded. There was a faint whir noise encroaching on us. Our shoes were crunching along on the gravel road back to the house. The Pine Barrens seemed like a closed room; that if we ran far enough, we'd run into a wall or something. It was probably just the psychological effect of the trees, jutting upwards invisibly into the pitch black sky. I couldn't really see anything other than the beam of light from Juan Mata's flashlight dancing along the road.

“If you guys do decide to kill us, can I call my parents again? I want to talk to my mom,” I said. Maybe they'd let me take turns calling people that I knew. Then, I could try to stretch my alloted calls in order to deliver secret hints to them as to where I was. I'd have to develop some sort of code, except I highly doubted that anyone I spoke to would suspect that I had developed and my efforts would be wasted.

Juan Mata didn't say anything, but “We're almost there.”

It turned out that I had run along the road a lot less than I had initially realized, since we saw the house and the lights on in the glassless windows. I think they were from those propane lanterns that people use for camping, usually not for criminal hideouts, like Nancy Drew criminals.

As we walked towards the house, one of the cars, I previously assumed to be empty, had its brights turned on, all the way. The darkness was shattered and I could only see purple spots, having looked directly into the headlights.

“It's the fucking police!” some voice shouted from behind the headlights. I stumbled backwards tripping over a tree root. The faint whirring from before became infinitely louder, as a floodlight from a helicopter overhead illuminated the entire area. I could barely hear anything, but the helicopter and the wind whipping the trees into a frenzy.

As anticlimaxes go, this one was my favorite. The Jersey Police showed up in a helicopter. It turned out that Raphaël, Gonzalo, and Ronaldo were in the car. And the CIA also showed up eventually. I didn't die. Steven didn't die. At the time, I didn't know what happened to Luka, but I was assuming he wasn't dead, either. Juan Mata, Oscar, Petr, and Eden were arrested. Mayor Mourinho's car was stopped when he was heading north out of the Pine Barrens. And that was how I was accidentally involved in the arrest of the Mayor of New York City for conspiracy to commit murder.

Most things blurred together in my memory. Gonzalo didn't let go of me, mostly repeating variations of “You fucking moron. You fucking moron” with varying emphases, pushing me past CIA agents, one of whom I was pretty sure I had hooked up with on occasion.

When we didn't get back to New York until five in the morning. We apparently couldn't leave until the police found Luka Modric running around in the woods; he was a talented survivalist, it turned out. The police were scouring the woods for him for two and a half hours, with bullhorns and everything. My parents were still up, though I couldn't tell if they had just stayed up or went to sleep and woke up ungodly early. My mother started crying into my shirt, which was not even the same color as it had originally been anymore.

I was pretty sure that they were never going to let me leave their house again, but the next day, I left, all in one emotional and physical piece. I didn't have any clothes, so I took my brother's pants and my mother's shirt.

I went to my office, mostly in order to grab the flashdrive from the Macaroni Hut's fake plant, but I decided to have a coffee and a bagel in my office before I went over. It was kind of bittersweet to be in my office, since I was planning to never be involved in crime or the solving of crime again. You didn't have to kidnap me twice: I was throwing in the towel, to earn rent in the conventional way. Maybe Samir could get me some telemarketer work; that'd be relatively unstressful.

A lot of finances would be freed up when I pack up, I thought. And I was approved for a student loan, so I could go back to Columbia. And I was going to get a nice check from Xabi Alonso, since I found Steven Gerrard. I wasn't sure about financial compensation from being kidnapped, but I wasn't going to worry about that one too much.

There was a knock on my office door. Hope enterred without waiting for a response from me, “So, I was worried you'd be angry with me.”

“For what? For trying to unkidnap me? Believe it or not, I'm actually quite forgiving on that.”

“For lying to you. For using you in my case against Stamford Bridge. For having sex with you under false pretenses. And for having the CIA follow you for two and a half weeks.”  
“So that's how you found out about that party, huh? And the bar. What about the Jersey Shore? Was that part of it too?”

“Pure coincidence,” she said. Now that she didn't have to pretend that she wanted to sex with me, Hope's body language was quite closed off; her arms were folded in front of her.

“So did you like me at all or are my revelations about this 'relationship' going to become more uncomfortable?”

“You're cute,” she said, smirking, “But you are dumb. I try not to go after the dumb ones.”

“We get kidnapped too often?”

"I think you're the only one who I've met who has that problem."

We left to go to the Macaroni Hut to dig out the flash drive.

“That's an odd hiding place for a lighter,” Hope observed, knowing that it was something important, but possibly not knowing exactly how important it was.

“It's my friend's. He didn't want to lose it.”

She snorted lightly, as we walked out, “I am so glad to be leaving this godforsaken city.”

“Where are you going? Home?”

“I wish, but we're going to Sweden to work on another case. I need to detox majorly from New York. I can now say firmly, the West Coast is, by far, the superior coast.”

“Blasphemy.”

“Have you ever been here?” she asked; I knew it was a rhetorical and sarcastic, but I took a deep breath. It smelled like body odor, smoke, and rotting food. It was hot enough to melt the tar on the streets, so businessmen and businesswomen left black footprints on the sidewalk as they hurried to work. I had my shoulder knocked into by three separate people during our short walk. It was loud, probably too loud; people yelled at each other, despite having no previous contact and no ill will. Voices sarcastic and bitter.  But I liked it.  I liked loud things:  music, voices, arguments, cities.  Maybe I didn't like the heat and the smell of rotting garbage I could do without, but it was colorful, half of the conversations were in languages I didn't know, and most of the city didn't smell bad.

“This is the best city in the World.”

Hope smiled at me, as though she pitied my stupidity. She kissed me on the cheek and we parted ways, since I had to go down stairs to the Subway, while Hope walked off, to go somewhere else.

When I got to the Upper West Side, Steven and Xabi weren't in, so I had to hang onto the flashdrive for a little bit longer.  It was a pretty nice day out, so I wondered around a little bit.  

All things considered, I'd like to point out that, I came out of the whole situation pretty well:  I didn't get murdered.  On the other hand, I did accidentally get the mayor arrested and the governor was being investigated for corruption.  This is one of those situations where you'd probably learn about yourself and the world around you, becoming more enlightened or a better person.  Unfortunately, except for figuring out that I was quitting the detective business, I don't think I grew as a human.  Or maybe I did and I didn't notice.  It didn't really matter.  It was a quite nice day and I knew, for some bone-deep inexplicable reason, that things were turning out for the better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed. It took a little longer than I expected to finish it, but I'm glad I did.
> 
> A/N: I recently started using Tumblr and that's how I got inspiration for a lot of Karim's character attributes. Case in point: http://tmblr.co/ZQLTmqvPxYZF That shirt exists and Karim Benzema owns it.


End file.
